Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks | Hacker News Reader

Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks

reuters.com

53 pointsrntn21 comments

Somewhat tangential, but the floppy disc icon has become the universal indicator for "save", and yet there's a whole generation of computer users who have never used them. I have to remind myself when designing GUIs that icons can be ambiguous.

Hate to post meme-like images but it reminds me of this: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ryHkppvMfyZZ0dWP0_FBrivPAZE=...

Nothing wrong with a good meme. Everything used to be skeumorphic and used pre-tech metaphors — the OS desktop being a metaphor for the literal top of a desk complete with folder icons that look like paper folders. The World Wide Web was seen as a jungle to be navigated by browsers with names like "Netscape Navigator" and "Safari". Now GUIs are imitating early technology and kids have no idea what's being imitated.

Which is good. We shouldn't forget computer history.

The German navy still uses 8 inch floppy disks: https://augengeradeaus.net/2024/07/modernisierung-der-brande...

(Sorry, article is in german, but Google Translate can help)

I still think no portable media exists that has the convenience and expense of diskettes.

The closest are Flash Drives, but they are still rather expensive when compared to diskettes. Many times in the past I would give or mail people a diskette and never expected it back. I also know a couple of lawyers that will give their clients a Flash Drive with documents on them as opposed to using email.

To bad one cannot buy a pack of sat 1G or 2G flash drives at the same cost that a pack of 10 diskettes use to to cost.

You absolutely can though. A 50/100 pack of 1GB flash drives is about $1.50 a drive on amazon. I looked at historical prices of floppy disks which were about $0.5 a diskette in 1990, or about $1.20 in today's prices. If you go down to a 512MB flash drive the prices are identical.

Shouldn't SD cards be more a substitute of diskettes than flash drives?

Most PC/laptops have SD slot and those who don't certainly has a SD reader.

It's most likely cheaper for the same density and definitely less carbon footprint.

It's really hard to find almost any device (except a phone) that doesn't have a USB-A port. Laptops still usually include at least one, and various other devices that you might need to copy files to/from (such as RasPi) have them too. It's the closest thing to a universal port that currently exists.

SD cards just don't have this ubiquity. Lots of laptops do not have an SD slot, so you have to use a separate reader dongle that plugs into... a USB-A port. Even worse, what's an "SD card"? Do you mean the large kind, or the microSD card that some phones still use for extra storage? So even if your laptop has a full-size SD slot, if someone gives you a microSD card, you're out of luck unless you happened to carry a microSD-to-fullsizeSD converter, or a USB SD reader.

It was a huge failure on the part of OS vendors that CD-R never became that.

The ISO9660 file system on CD-Rs was specifically designed so that you could add on sessions to a disk that "deleted" or "modified" files on earlier sessions, so that an OS could just present a CD-R as a huge floppy and it would work seamlessly until the disk ran out of space to append new data to.

Then they failed again with DVD-RAM, which was also basically a gigantic optical floppy disk.

(Personally I stopped using floppy disks in around 1998/1999. Before going to school I'd start an upload of the document I needed to my ISPs 10 MB of FTP space on my 56k modem at home before leaving, and by the time I arrived at school, it was done. This was still more reliable than using floppies.)

if it fits on a disk I can just email it to you, or email you a link to cloud storage download. The cost of doing this is essential $0. Diskettes are just obsolete.

I look forward to the day when Germany ends the use of fax machines.

Never! That would break the strength of the German Military force!

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1bd2ocv/german_mili...

Not just Germany. The entire medical community in the United States.

> Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday

Sorry Rocky and Clarence, but the heyday was three decades ago. We're old.

2 decades is about right for the tail end of the heyday.

Heyday: The period of greatest popularity

2004 was not the heyday of floppy disks, nor even it's tail. It was the tail end of any normal usage whatsoever.

No mention of they replaced them with, sounds like some government propaganda.

Replaced with faxes, sd-cards and cd-roms, just to say they've got rid of floppies.

Apparently this is something to be excited about in Japan? What happened? Japan was the future...

Needs to add (2024) at end of title

you only add the year at the end if it is older than the current year.

hilarious

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