2 ms·

1 happens every fucking day, hell wasn't there an article today about people who have older equipment that depend on floppy disks and how hard it is to find rel

1 happens every fucking day, hell wasn't there an article today about people who have older equipment that depend on floppy disks and how hard it is to find reliable disks these days? The article discussed an older embroidery machine, the only way to supply it with patterns to embroider was 3.5 inch floppy. His are starting to fail. But this is also true of older samplers, drum machines, synthesizers, etc. Sometimes someone manages to spin up new manufacturing of retro components or things to replace the retro components (there are a few pcbs running around that can replace floppy drives that conform to certain interfaces with usb sticks or sd cards or even a network): Vacuum tubes, parts for vintage cars, parts for vintage watches, vinyl records, etc. but often before that happens the entire known supply needs to be scavenged. So I can imagine a world where we manage to start doing the things we are doing with some new technology that is not digital silicon based computers that run on electricity. But there will be edges where the new technology is not compatible with some system, and in that edge lives this kind of speculation.

Dylan16807 4y ago
We stop making specific models, and lose how to make spare parts for those models. We don't lose how to make the machines in general. This story would be completely different if the old silicon computers were replaced with neo-computers. Also for anything that uses a standard floppy drive there are cheap and plentiful adapters to use flash storage instead of disks.
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  I have yet to see a thing I can insert into a floppy drive that will pretend to be a disk. I have seen plenty of things that can replace the drive itself with something that pretends to be a floppy drive. The problem with those are that not all equipment that uses floppy drives conforms to standards. If you have a 50 year old embroidery machine from a company that no longer even exists you'd need someone pretty fucking technical to pull that shit apart and figure out if any of those drive replacements will even work in your weirdass machine. If you are lucky your machine used some off the shelf drive from a reputable company (I've seen some old weird drum machines machines that had Apple Disk ][ drives hanging off them) but otherwise...

Dylan16807 4y ago

We stop making specific models, and lose how to make spare parts for those models. We don't lose how to make the machines in general. This story would be completely different if the old silicon computers were replaced with neo-computers. Also for anything that uses a standard floppy drive there are cheap and plentiful adapters to use flash storage instead of disks.

sleepybrett 4y ago
I have yet to see a thing I can insert into a floppy drive that will pretend to be a disk. I have seen plenty of things that can replace the drive itself with something that pretends to be a floppy drive. The problem with those are that not all equipment that uses floppy drives conforms to standards. If you have a 50 year old embroidery machine from a company that no longer even exists you'd need someone pretty fucking technical to pull that shit apart and figure out if any of those drive replacements will even work in your weirdass machine. If you are lucky your machine used some off the shelf drive from a reputable company (I've seen some old weird drum machines machines that had Apple Disk ][ drives hanging off them) but otherwise...