Oh yeah, USB 1.0 here we come 😎
Read the article…still don’t know what kind of floppies? Those big huge 8", 5.25", or those little bitty ones.?
I used to work in maintenance on ATC systems. The system the controllers use to interact with radios and telephones still used 3.5" floppies for the weekly data backup.
I can remember upgrading the system from Win 3.1 to XP in like 2012.
They said systems dating back to the 80’s, so I’m gonna guess that 8" are out, they didn’t last all that long once 5.25" came along.
I have an IBM oscilloscope from the mid/late 80s that uses 3.5” floppies for storage. They were already standardized at 1.44mb by 1986, and way more reliable ands robust than the bigger disks.
I know the big disks hung on in a few weird places (like the nuclear arsenal supposedly), but I bet ATC ended up with 3.5s as the ultimate magnetic media. As long as they were big enough, why change?
Also as a child of the 80s, I remember just how far the 5.25” vanished from stores when the 3.5 took over.
Yeah, that’s why I didn’t speculate as to whether 5.25" or 3.5" was more likely, just that 8" would have been unlikely. We don’t know how old the systems are, but I suspect you’re right; the supply of 3.5" diskettes would have stuck around much longer, too.
So they have vaccume tube computers, floppy disks (side note, where the fuck are they getting the media?) and plans to have AI assistants in a few years because of a lack of qualified applicants.
The mind boggles.
It’s basically half a decade of the computer history museum all in one room. If they just charged admission they could afford to upgrade.
Wait… I’m almost certain that I’ve seen a project that emulated floppy drives with flash media.
I have this one in my 486:
Nice! Maybe air traffic control will get them by 2050 ;-)
I don’t understand the purpose/use.
Well it’s a drop in solution. You could remove the floppy reader from a computer, slap this in, and as far as the old computer is concerned, whenever you insert a flash drive in the front, it sees a really big floppy disk.
This is nice because usb is more compact, widely compatible and flash media is more stable, floppy disks can become corrupted pretty quickly.
This is for computers with PATA, without USB, to load virtual floppies?
That certainly appears to be the situation. So by “virtual floppy”, they mean that this device adds a USB port and that drives inserted into that port are interpreted by the machine as floppies.
Amazon, believe it or not.
Fucking Sony.
