Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/04/japan-says-goodbye-to-floppy-disks-in-official-use.html
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Its paltry capacity, a mere 1.44 megabytes at best, forced users into a constant juggling act of disk swapping and file compression.
It got that bit quite accurate. bizarrely recall having to sit-n-swap 8 floppies through a FORTRAN compiler install and more than 13 for a LaTeX ‘full’ font set. (the FORTRAN compiler necessary because the old head of the lab had to have his stats analysis programs, originally written on a card deck -sigh-) f@#$ i’m old.
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The floppy disk will always be with us, if only in the virtual ‘Save’ icon.
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IIRC, Borland C++ was somewhere around 30. For the final version that came on CD-ROM, if someone wanted floppies, they sent them a CD-ROM drive, it was cheaper.
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You’re throwing out a challenge like that, and you’re not even bringing an eight incher to the fight??
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I wanted to leave room for escalation. 
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Try 85 floppies for a SAS install with all the various optional modules. We had to carry a cardboard box with tons of mostly empty 3.5" floppy boxes to the recipient’s office. It would literally take hours. Since this was the age of MicroTac style phones, Solitaire or Minesweeper was being played at the same time.
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I recall having to do Windows 95 updates with floppy disks, i don’t remember the exact number but it was a big pile. Several times had moments where on the last disc something would go wrong and the update would stall at 99% complete and would have to start over
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I like to think that this is actually a normal-sized disc, and everyone in red dwarf is, well… very very small.
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… the FORTRAN-77 compiler was just dropped from POSIX this year
POSIX 2024 has been published
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Oooo… a Guru Mediation screen. I’ve not seen one of those in a long time… long time.
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Sounds like something was a bit corrupt. That sucks.
Squishy banana can corrupt disk drives I have found. I once had to clean all the floppy drives in a small computer lab because someone had stuck their gooey 3.5" disk into all the PCs because it kept giving read errors.
Then there was the time one of my coworkers complained that his disks kept getting wiped for some reason. He had them stored safely in a metal filing cabinet.
Upon which sat
For the young folks in here I will explain that this device has a large magnet coil with which to ring the bell that was also inside. (Can you say degausser?)
And I don’t know how many times I was asked by grad students to recover the only copy of their thesis from disks that had literal rings worn into them.
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Maybe Japan can end its love affair with fax machines next?
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Ahem.
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So says an unreadable paywalled article from 2020? 
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I worked on SAS. The manuals took up an impressive amount of shelf space. I’m impressed they got all of it on floppies. 
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I remember a job where we had 8" floppies. We used them to boot the tape drive.
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