Okay for real though… storage size? Terrible I agree.
But I’ve been kinda obsessed lately with the form factor of diskettes. They’re:
- Not super easy to lose (looking
atfor you, nanoSD) - They’re easily labeled.
- Unlike flash drives, aren’t vulnerable to snagging and getting ripped out of the machine or damaging the port when inserted.
- Easily stacked or filed away.
- Most importantly: Make a nice satisfying “ka-chunk” when inserting into a drive.
- Satisfyingly fly out of said drive when you push the eject button firmly.
Nowadays, if we made a diskette that basically replaced the magnetic disc with flash memory, and the shutter protected the connectors, you could hypothetically store like 1TB in that space, it could likely be read super fast, and would obviously be way more reliable than the old “Oh no a speck of dust ruined my 2MB file” of old floppies.
I’d even settle for an open standard akin to Sony’s chunky little Memory Sticks…I liked those.
- Not super easy to lose (looking
Did they send everyone a fax to let them know that floppies are no longer used?
Are you in Germany? They’re still using fax, predominantly, here. My doctor wanted to fax my records, couldn’t email them to me. I said of course don’t have a fkn fax, it’s 2024. I asked if people still have pots lines for fax machines and she said they use e-fax. There’s your German efficiency!
Anyway, government passed some law saying they have to cease using them (for gov business) by end of 2024. In the meantime, don‘t throw that telegraph out just yet!
Nah, was mostly just making a joke about the other old tech that Japan was notorious for still using.
Also, I’m really confused WHY eFax is fine but email isn’t? I mean, once you lose the verifiability of the phone logs that say your doctor called you at 2:15pm and send 3 pages of shit, uh, you might as well just email a PDF. (Note: I’m in the US and the ‘verifiable transmission’ thing was why/how we did it for a long time, but that died in about 10 seconds when someone figured out that email was cheaper.)
It’s crazy! The doctor said they weren’t allowed to use email because fax was more secure. I explained that using e-fax wasn’t any more secure. I also reached out to a guy I know who works IT for a small village and the way he laid it out is that Germany doesn’t want to have to upgrade and train everyone on email, buy all the computers, go through the growing pains of new tech.
This sums up Germany in general… if it’s not broken then shut up, there’s nothing to fix. You can’t even go grocery shopping or wash your car on Sundays. The rest of the EU runs laps around Germany on tech and progressive life.
(Transplant from USA, I should note. It’s been a journey.)
Worked for a public library in the U.S.
It was eye-opening and soul crushing how many people were there just because the government/insurance/medical/legal/whatever was forcing them to fax pages.
What’s more hilarious is that faxes are only in black and white…and these jokers would demand faxed IDs and licenses…and then complain when all the pretty-pretty reflective anti-counterfeit layers resulted in a mostly black blob rectangle.
We had to use some scanner that basically “e-faxed” it anyway. It took a long time per page, charged $1/per, BTW, and after it connected to a kind of “courier server” it would attempt to establish the phone line connection.
This would routinely time out and require you to hit “retry” before it just closed and erased everything you just did.
Even then, it would regularly encounter some random connection error and…close and erase everything you just did.
…Sending so many stupid faxes was a huge motivator behind quitting that clown show, among a million other things lol.
so what’s wrong with floppy disks?
Nothing except for the limited size. I believe even today, nothing exists today for temp storage that have the convenience of diskettes.
USB Flash Drives comes close, but cheaper versions can in rare cases have firmware “virises”. On a diskette, just do a format and all issues gone. Also I never even thought twice about mailing a file on a diskette expecting to never see that diskette again. Flash Drives, I still would like to get it back after mailing it out :)
