Tokyo says long goodbye to beloved floppy disks(asia.nikkei.com)
asia.nikkei.com
Tokyo says long goodbye to beloved floppy disks
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Tokyo-says-long-goodbye-to-beloved-floppy-disks
12 comments
Now please do the fax machines :)
Fax machines are special, and I don't see them leaving Japan soon.
As humans, we have a few forms of I/O: reading, writing, listening, speaking, typing, singing, doing, going.
Phone calls use listening and speaking. Emails are reading and typing.
It is possible to do some of these in parallel - I can listen to music and sing along while coding or walking.
Writing (with a pen or pencil) is not common on a computer. There are graphics tablets, but they are made for art, not legal signatures, and they don't include a paper copy.
Replacing the fax machine would involve Wacom (pen digitiser), Adobe (PDF certificate chain of trust), Mitsubishi (pens to make a hard copy while writing the tele-letter), and then 50 years of risk assessment throughout the organisation, slowly filtering through the Process changes needed to replace fax.
Should fax be replaced? Yes! Definitely! But there's reasons why the culture in Japan still uses fax, and changing the root cause is much more work than just suggesting another communication preference. If someone told me to leave a voicemail to Hacker News instead of a typed comment, I probably wouldn't have sent this reply. People are not wrong to prefer writing, and fax technology still serves their needs better than email.
As humans, we have a few forms of I/O: reading, writing, listening, speaking, typing, singing, doing, going.
Phone calls use listening and speaking. Emails are reading and typing.
It is possible to do some of these in parallel - I can listen to music and sing along while coding or walking.
Writing (with a pen or pencil) is not common on a computer. There are graphics tablets, but they are made for art, not legal signatures, and they don't include a paper copy.
Replacing the fax machine would involve Wacom (pen digitiser), Adobe (PDF certificate chain of trust), Mitsubishi (pens to make a hard copy while writing the tele-letter), and then 50 years of risk assessment throughout the organisation, slowly filtering through the Process changes needed to replace fax.
Should fax be replaced? Yes! Definitely! But there's reasons why the culture in Japan still uses fax, and changing the root cause is much more work than just suggesting another communication preference. If someone told me to leave a voicemail to Hacker News instead of a typed comment, I probably wouldn't have sent this reply. People are not wrong to prefer writing, and fax technology still serves their needs better than email.
please don't, i quite enjoy the convenience of being able to pick up thermal paper rolls for my teletype at the local stationery store.
(this comment isn't satire, i do occasionally use ti silent 703 connected to my computer)
(this comment isn't satire, i do occasionally use ti silent 703 connected to my computer)
Cool! A thermal paper tty?
yes, these are quite popular: http://www.vintagevolts.com/texas-instruments-silent-700-ser...
Thank you! So compact too. I can’t afford not to buy one.
hey now let's calm down with that crazy talk.
They only stopped using floppies because it was getting (napkin math) 20 million times more expensive per data volume than modern data storage.
They only stopped using floppies because it was getting (napkin math) 20 million times more expensive per data volume than modern data storage.
My fax line, which I need because my bank can't email me a wire payment notification, still gets spam.
This article on Gizmodo was submitted a couple days ago: https://gizmodo.com/tokyos-government-is-finally-saying-good...
Don't know if adds any info.
Don't know if adds any info.
The article overstates the reliability of floppies compared to my experiences.
Context:
Japan using cassette tapes and faxes (2015), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10497355
Some media readers (like the Rosewill RCR-FD400 [1]) still integrated them, and for motherboards without the ribbon cable header you could swap out the stock one for a slim USB floppy drive (e.g. Y-E Data's YD-8U10 [2]). Here's a quick and dirty pic from the workstation I'm on now: https://i.imgur.com/ZIjHgat.png
One thing I miss about floppy disks (and other earlier forms of media like CD's) is they couldn't impersonate other devices onto your bus - a disk was just a disk. Less potential for compromised media to do bad things to your PC.
[1] https://www.newegg.com/rosewill-rcr-fd400-74-in-1/p/N82E1682...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20100130173743/http://www.geeks....