
Why the Floppy Disk Is Still Used Today - bowyakka
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/why-do-floppy-disks-still-exist-the-world-isnt-ready-to-move-on/
======
fnordfnordfnord
>The key word here is reliability — and that’s likely the reason floppy disks
are still being used in medical equipment, ATMs, and aviation hardware as Tom
mentioned. The cutting edge of technology is fine for your smartphone or a
video game console. But when it comes to mission-critical hardware that
literally controls a potential nuclear holocaust, “tried and true” carries
more weight than “new and improved.”

Great gobs of bullshit. Floppies aren't reliable and they never were. The
disks are easily damaged, susceptible to contamination from dust, they wear
out quickly; the same goes for the drives. As an example, the Tektronix 3000
series oscilloscopes came equipped with floppy drives, and that was by far the
most common reason (like many times more often than any other reason) for
repair on the things. Thankfully after they started coming equipped with
ethernet, you could forget about the floppy drive. Take note that all the
examples mentioned relate to industries which are very conservative WRT
implementing technology, and have an onerous approval process to get new tech
in use; that's not evidence that floppies are somehow superior, but rather
that the process for approving new tech. is sometimes too burdensome. When I
was in college, a large fraction of my IEEE chapter's non-dues fundraising was
through sales of floppy disks to students; because the damn things weren't
reliable.

The "This Morning" segment included is a fluff piece, and completely at odds
with recent (well, 2013/2014, not too distant past) reporting of serious
problems with the stewardship of nuclear weapons. I am not sure why any sane
person would want to gloss over those problems

[http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2014/01/30/268880352/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2014/01/30/268880352/air-force-cheating-scandal-widens-to-92-nuclear-
officers)

[http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2014/0116/Another-
Air-...](http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2014/0116/Another-Air-Force-
scandal-cheating-by-nuclear-launch-officers-video)

~~~
engi_nerd
> Take note that all the examples mentioned relate to industries which are
> very conservative WRT implementing technology, and have an onerous approval
> process to get new tech in use; that's not evidence that floppies are
> somehow superior, but rather that the process for approving new tech. is
> sometimes too burdensome.

My own personal experience with this follows: My last job as a sounding rocket
telemetry engineer required me to use 3.5" floppies regularly, because the
majority of the GSE in use for supporting launches was still running a program
called TDPlus. TDPlus, which runs in DOS, is intended for the real-time
monitoring of telemetry data. We had lunch-box style computers with the old-
style 51 pin parallel port for "high speed" data (up to 10 Megabits/sec)
interfacing with experimenter equipment, as well as GDP Space Systems
bitsync/decom cards.

The lunchbox computers were always breaking down. Floppies were subject to all
the faults you mention and were always failing. I found a hoard of floppies in
an old cabinet and spent a day or so seeing which ones I could still use, and
then protected them like gold.

All of this was still used because management claimed that "the right color of
money doesn't exist for us to upgrade this". They had started to get a few
newer units when I left...but depending on such horribly unreliable units for
critical launch functions still boggles my mind. There's "too burdensome" and
then there's out-right mismanagement.

On the other hand, the floppies I used and the dot-matrix printouts of the
data I monitored are neat souvenirs from that time in my life.

------
byuu
I've had to use them up until just recently. To run reverse engineering tests
on an SNES console, I've had to use an old copier device. It's a box that
plugs into the cartridge port and will load games off of floppy disks. (and of
course, it can copy games plugged into the box onto said floppies.)

Usually takes around 5-10 minutes to split an image file into four parts,
write them to floppies, and then load them one at a time onto the copier. And
it's only that fast because I'd do it in parallel. The disks would usually
fail after a few hundred write cycles, so I stocked up on quite a few.

Thankfully, I now have two alternatives. A flash cart that takes an SD card,
and soon a boot loader for the expansion port that will let me load my own
code through the controller port via serial.

So I'm done with floppies at long last; but now my new fun is sourcing
5V-tolerant components, and card edge connectors for an extremely rare pitch
size :D

~~~
tracker1
If you're into firearms and close to a suitable location, seeing a cell phone
fly apart from snake-shot (think shotgun-style ammo for a handgun) at close
range is pretty gratifying, even if cleanup isn't the most fun... used to do
that once a year with expired hardware, more so with the troublesome hardware.

------
otis_inf
One word that I don't associate with floppies is 'reliable'. I don't know how
many times I had bad sectors on my floppies back in the day. There's no
protection against magnetic fields, the material on the plastic disk isn't
always OK (hence the 'single sided' 3.5" floppies you could buy and which you
could transform into double-sided floppies by punching a hole in the corner
;))

So it was surprising to me that floppies were seen as reliable in the article
and e.g. usb sticks aren't (they're not mentioned as an alternative at all,
which I find a little odd)

~~~
avian
> There's no protection against magnetic fields

I agree that floppies were all but reliable in practice. But I suspect
sensitivity to magnetic fields was largely a myth. I did some experiments back
in the day with some permanent magnets and 3.5" disks. As I remember it was
pretty hard to make the disk unreadable with those. Granted they were probably
much weaker than what is available today (neodymium must have been terribly
exotic back then). I was much less afraid after that that some carelessly
positioned magnet will wipe out my floppy library.

~~~
mikeash
I agree. I tried to erase 3.5" and 5.25" floppies with refrigerator magnets as
a kid, and they did nothing.

Magnetism is an inverse-cube law, and the write head is _really_ close to the
disk. Even if you hold your magnet to the floppy casing, you have a hard fight
against the inverse cube.

------
rdl
Could you make a simulated floppy disk which worked in existing physical
drives, but contained flash (and thus lots of more storage, potentially more
reliable, etc.)?

I know there are floppy DRIVE emulators like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator)
but I want to emulate the DISK.

There are also of course software solutions to this in a lot of cases, too,
especially if you can virtualize, but sometimes hardware is needed.

~~~
pjc50
It's almost certainly doable, although detecting the head position is going to
be a hassle. But you can't increase the capacity much, because you're limited
to N sectors and M tracks.

~~~
rdl
Yeah, but you can have a huge library of virtual floppies and load those based
on external selector or something else.

------
rollthehard6
Another floppy disk hold out are the many musical keyboards/synths
manufactured in the 80s and 90s that used floppy drives to load patches and
sequences. Hell, patch, there is another anachronism that has a lot in common
with the floppy disk icon :)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesizer#Patch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesizer#Patch)

~~~
buffoon
Still use one of them myself. Korg Triton :)

------
gaius
A floppy disk ejected from the drive and stored in a safe with a Marine with a
rifle standing in front of it, is 1000x more secure than _anything_ connected
to the Internet. Maybe a million times more.

~~~
lucozade
If I recall correctly it wasn't the storage bit that was usually the problem.

It was the "A:\ is not accessible" message you received when you put it back
in.

~~~
gaius
Punch cards or tape then, what you lose in rewriteability you gain in
reliability.

~~~
lucozade
Having used both I'd tend to agree with you. Completely safe from EMPs and
North Koreas.

It's just mice you have to watch out for.

~~~
gaius
A Marine with a rifle and a cat, then

~~~
pluma
Another problem solved by adding cats.

------
DiThi
Many complain here about how bad the disks where, but nobody seem to remember
the sudden quality drop in the late 90s. For me it was very different to use a
(not very used) 10 year old disk than using a freshly bought one, any brand.

~~~
VLM
Optical media underwent a similar reliability collapse where long term
reliability went from near 100% to maybe 50% when prices dropped.

I haven't used legacy flash media in a long time, I wonder if it followed the
same pattern toward the end of its life when prices collapsed. Flash sticks
used to be pretty reliable... back when 32 megs was a big flash drive.

~~~
digi_owl
Well older flash media likely use larger components on the dies. And larger
components means less leakage, iirc.

That said, i wonder how much the quality drop of various media can be traced
to outsorcing fever. Meaning that just about every brand just a sticker on the
same product made in some Asian sweat shop factory.

------
mhd
It's a common source of ridicule amongst German IT workers (esp. commuters)
that our high-speed trains ("ICE") still use disks to transfer seat
reservations. And it's not that infrequent that you'll hear "seat reservations
can't be displayed" being announced at the platform, probably because the
train couldn't be anointed by the holy plastic wafer.

------
sytelus
It's truly frightening to see logic used to justify use of floppy disks in
nuke silos: reliability, "tried and true", no need for internet connection!
None of these make any technical sense. This software likely is getting no
real testing so all these assertions are pointless. The naive assumption that
whatever built in 90s was bug-free, most reliable and most secure is
completely baseless. It's almost guaranteed that the software possibly has
many bugs and issues that wouldn't have been addressed without advances in
tools and techniques such as TDD, ability to do massive exhaustive testing,
ability to measure code coverage, better safety features in languages, fixes
in standard libraries, patches in kernels, provable algorithms for multi-
threading and so on. Just think about old flaky FAT disk format VS advanced
far more reliable new disk formats. If you can develop new fighter planes, you
can sure develop new control software that is at least as reliable as previous
generation.

~~~
certainly_not
The systems _are_ time-tested. How many accidental launches have happened so
far? Zero. In my opinion that's the most important metric of these systems, as
long as they are still credible threats otherwise.

Also, what could a better system improve? Slightly faster launches? Slightly
more certain launches? I argue that those are not important -- the enemy won't
fear the missiles more if they run off USB. But you _might_ increase the
chance of a false launch, and certainly incur large testing costs.

~~~
pdw
From a military point of view, the huge advantage of floppy disks is that
they're dumb storage. The modern replacements such as USB storage or SD cards
are microprocessor-based systems. How are you going to verify that the SD
cards you're buying don't have malicious firmware?

~~~
amorphid
You most definitely don't want infected USB drives in your nuclear facility!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet)

~~~
Dylan16807
That's a different issue. That's a file that makes certain systems misbehave.
The drives are dumb storage.

When your storage device itself is smart and compromised, you can't even
verify what its contents are. Things get much worse.

~~~
paulryanrogers
I imagine BadUSB would fall into that latter category

------
tragomaskhalos
It's interesting to speculate what would have happened if the parallel
innovations of CD and internet had not sidelined the floppy, since software
was already outgrowing them : the last version of Visual C++ that I installed
from floppies came on IIRC several dozen disks, requiring the thing to be
carried in a couple of sturdy carrier bags - clearly not a sustainable
situation.

~~~
pavlov
The Zip drive by Iomega enjoyed a few years of popularity around 1995-1998:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive)

They were commonly used in graphic design, at least. (Designers needed to send
files to print all the time, and the Zip drive was the standard until CD-R
became cheap and fast enough.)

~~~
digi_owl
There were Zip, there were Jaz, there were LS120, there were various MO
formats.

Thinking about it i wonder if what killed it was not just the CD-R, but also
that it went from primary storage (early PC etc) to transitory storage
(sneakernet etc) as HDDs took over.

~~~
rplst8
I actually bought a floppy drive from Best Buy around 2002 as a replacement. I
had some old files I needed from floppy, and Best Buy was the only place open.
Cost me $35 at the time. When I got home, I was surprised to find the floppy
drive inside had a 40 pin connector instead of the standard 34 pin (MFM)
connector. The drive seemed a little different, and I hesitantly connected it
to my desktop to find that it was recognized as an LS-120 drive.

By 2002 LS-120 was already past its peak and even Zip drives were pretty much
old news. I think I got my first Thumb drive a year later, with about 512 MB
of storage.

I still have the LS-120 drive in my primary desktop, and it was a nice drive.
It was quieter than other floppy drives, and had a motorized load and eject
function.

------
kazinator
When I was in high school, some kid's 3.5" floppy didn't read. He was all
upset about losing some images he had been working on in a paint program.

I slid open the window and turned the center hub to inspect the surface, which
soon revealed a glaring fingerprint; some prankster almost certainly had done
that on purpose.

I peeled the black, plastic casing open, and took out the disk, which I then
gently washed with cold water and soap in the boys' washroom, drying it with a
paper towel.

I slid the disk it back into its casing, and popped it into the drive. It read
perfectly.

------
blue1
I remember the various floppies (5.25", 3.5") to be the most _unreliable_
piece of technology I have ever worked with (almost on par with Datassette
tapes). Read errors were commonplace.

~~~
whoopdedo
Having gone through a pile of old floppy disks, I think magnetic media is
pretty reliable for long-term storage if treated well. Keep them clean, away
from strong magnets, and at moderate temperature and humidity and the data
will remain readable for many years.

Where it fails is on re-writing. The disks I had that were most likely to be
bad after sitting in storage were the ones I had erased multiple times. If I
had only written to a disk once or twice then I usually had no problem reading
it again.

~~~
tracker1
rotate it regularly... if you're talking tape drives, re-wind them and always
store upright... too much has been lost to poorly storing magnetic and film
media.

Fortunately digital conversion is pretty damned good and easy enough to back
up... if only "The Wonder Years" hadn't downmixed the music and vocals into
their master copies... :-(

------
Namrog84
I liked this story. I still have a few floppies in storage as mementos of
times long since past. Maybe I'll consider sending in to make them useful for
someone somewhere else.

~~~
stinos
I have a 'picture wall' at our house and in between the pictures with good
memories I also put some floppy disks (and cassettes). Looks nice in my
opinion and reminds me of those times when taking a picture was still somewhat
special, and the output was something to be kept, whereas now in the majority
of cases it seems pictures are taken to be looked at once and then forgotten
for eternity.

~~~
kqr
There are still some of us crazies around who take photos on film and create
prints ourselves in a bathroom-turned-darkroom in our homes.

Definitely gives more weight to each picture when the turnaround is weeks, and
each picture requires hours of physical work.

------
protomyth
The 8" disks I used were actually pretty good for reliability[1]. The 5 1/4"
drives were just plain problematic. Doubly so if you used a "Disk Doubler"[2].
The 3 1/2" were pretty nice after the 5 1/4", but I'm still not sure they were
ever as good as the 8". I'm glad to be rid of the whole lot of them with USB
Flash drives.

I will say it was quite exciting to buy an Indus Floppy Drive for my Atari 400
(upgraded to 48Kbytes). It was amazing going from the 410 cassette player to
the floppy. The door popped up in a most satisfying manner.

1) I'm with the other posters that "tried and true" and "know quantity" is
probably a better way to look at it. Also, the stuff using the floppy drives
probably just works.

2) for the younger crowd, at one time 5 1/4 floppies came in single sided and
double sided varieties. So, depending on the floppy drive you bought the
correct one. The price wasn't all that different. 5 1/4 floppies have a notch
on the side that tells you how to insert it. Put it in wrong and the drive
won't close since part of the mechanism goes down through the notch. Now, some
"genius" decided that if you had a single sided drive and cut a notch in the
other side of the floppy you could use both sides of the disk in much the same
way you could play both sides of a record. This 'genius' started selling a
device that was basically a hole puncher with a metal attachment that held the
floppy properly to punch the hole (really a small square punch). You then
could use both sides. Now, inserting the disk upside down would work, but the
disk spins the opposite direction. You can guess how this interacted with the
fabric that removed dust built into the floppy.
[http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue10/036_1_FLIPPING...](http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue10/036_1_FLIPPING_YOUR_DISK.php)
is an old article on it and Wikipedia has pictures
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Flippy_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Flippy_disks)

Serendipity is an amazing thing, as I type this "I'm Much Too Young (To Feel
This Damn Old)" just started playing on my music player. I'll leave it to
someone else to explain the purpose of the pencil when talking cassette tapes.

~~~
tracker1
I'd imagine that the tolerances are loose enough on an 8" floppy, that barring
physical damage, they probably are pretty reliable. 5.25 were somewhat
problematic though... I remember in the mid 90's when the quality went through
the toilet.. the last 50-pack of 3.5" 2shd disks I bought, I swear about 1 in
4 had errors out of the box... I don't think I used even half of it though.

I've kept a home server and/or nas since the early 00's, and haven't really
looked back... I did notice how slow even flash media is though, trying to
copy a season of a tv show to my tablet to view while out of town for a couple
days recently... took too long, not enough space (got a 128gb microsd for next
time), and just plain cumbersome.

It's hard to think about being disconnected these days. I lost over half my
workday to a VPN issue.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
I wonder how difficult it would be for FloppyDisk.com to actually manufacture
their own floppies.

------
tracker1
I recently bought a new 3.5" usb floppy drive because a few friends wanted
some stuff off their old disks, no telling how much will be recoverable, but
willing to try.

It's interesting how little I've thought about the old formats for years. How
many floppy/zip/jazz etc disks have useful data on them to this day. I worked
doing support for iomega back in the day and the only thing it made me was
slightly paranoid about multiple copies in multiple locations for anything
really important.

------
dade_
The Morbidelli U26 still runs like a tank, this article is bang on. The
industrial control units are proprietary as are the drive pinouts. That said,
it does support KERMIT, but it is a lot more difficult to train people to use
a serial terminal than it is to just keep using floppies. Apparently they are
still running 15K Euro:
[http://www.kitmondo.com/morbidelli-u-26/ref157473](http://www.kitmondo.com/morbidelli-u-26/ref157473)

------
rwhitman
Vintage electronic music gear, which is still widely popular with certain
genres of music, use floppies heavily.

12-bit samplers like the E-mu SP-1200 and Akai MPC60 which are still popular
with hip hop producers rely on floppies. A number of other classic samplers
and synthesizers use them as well. There's a lot of demand for floppies in
that community.

~~~
scrumper
Knowing that group (meaning vintage gear heads rather than hip hop producers)
there's doubtless endless online discussions about which particular brand of
floppy gives the crunchiest sound. Can't beat the warmth of the MF2-HD.

------
RobCubed
A lot of CNC machines still use floppies. There are some great USB interfaces
(that emulate a floppy drive to the CNC controller) that let you use USB
sticks. You still have to format the USB stick to 1.44MB (so... buy lots of
very small ones) for it to work, but it's been much better since we've
switched to these.

------
WalterBright
I don't miss floppies.

