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>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 ment

>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/air-force-cheating-scandal-widens-to-92-nuclear-officers http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/30/268880352/... http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2014/0116/Another-Air-Force-scandal-cheating-by-nuclear-launch-officers-video http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2014/0116/Another-Air-...

kazinator 11y ago
Indeed. You will get better mileage out of some reasonably small EEPROM (also, old, tried and true) that has millions of write cycles and a 100 year lifetime. Chip encased in epoxy, no moving parts. No brainer. The only reason floppies would be used in some medical equipment is that in that kind of niche market, you can get away with holding customers hostage with old crap (and at inflated prices).
runholm 11y ago
He is not talking about the reliability of the disks themselves or the drives, but rather the reliability of the massive infrastructure they are connected to.
xlm1717 11y ago
Seems the problem is they are confusing "reliable" with "tried and true". The onerous approval processes have more to do with sticking with "the devil you know".
engi_nerd 11y ago
> 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.

kazinator 11y ago

Indeed. You will get better mileage out of some reasonably small EEPROM (also, old, tried and true) that has millions of write cycles and a 100 year lifetime. Chip encased in epoxy, no moving parts. No brainer. The only reason floppies would be used in some medical equipment is that in that kind of niche market, you can get away with holding customers hostage with old crap (and at inflated prices).

runholm 11y ago

He is not talking about the reliability of the disks themselves or the drives, but rather the reliability of the massive infrastructure they are connected to.

xlm1717 11y ago

Seems the problem is they are confusing "reliable" with "tried and true". The onerous approval processes have more to do with sticking with "the devil you know".

engi_nerd 11y ago

> 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.