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Yeah, I donāt have a philosophical problem with critical infrastructure being run on low capacity rare hardware. As long as backup plans are in place, procedures are followed, and plan B/C/D/E are well understood by operations.
Otherwise yeah, you contract a healthy dose of stuxnet
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That reminds me of an old story. This might be an urban legend, but supposedly there was a company who switched over to computers in the early 80s. They had an issue where one lady would enter data into a spread sheet, but the next day the data was gone. So they had a guy from IBM come in and sit with her through the day to watch her process, to make sure she was properly saving everything, etc.
At the end of the day he was like, āWell, you seem to be doing everything correctly. I am not sure what the issue is. I guess go home and I will get a tech in to check the computer.ā
At that point she took the disk out, and stuck it on to the file cabinet for tomorrow with a magnet.
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For another floppy based story of hilarity. this is one from when i worked on an IT helpdesk:
We got a call because a department couldnāt read a file from a floppy disk (fair enough) but seemed to be in an excessive panic about it.
Turns out said file was something vitally important and was kept on that floppy because, i quote, āthey didnāt trust the networkā (ie. multiple redundant systems that were fully backed up every 24 hours). So they kept this critical file on one single floppy disk and had never made a copy of itā¦
Many facepalms were had (and they were very lucky, scandisk actually fixed it)
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Yes, at least itās an obsolete standard.
Imagine if theyād upgraded to 3 inch disks. They seemed as possible as anything else at the time, yet 3.5inch disks beat them out. 3.5inch disks came on different forms before the shakeout.
Once the others fell out, finding āfloppiesā probably became an issue long ago. Imagine spending a lot f money on the wrong form.
A friend of mine does IT work for a government-run university program, and a few years ago they asked for a brand-spankinā-new database customized for their legacy systemsā¦ in BASIC.
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Oh. that level of misconception isnāt rare (which you already know, since you worked at a HellDesk).
Just about a year ago a VIP told me he was emailing [unencrypted!] huge files full of legally sensitive information because he ādidnāt trust SFTPā.
Back when I used to do everything-support for a venerable scientific research institute, I learned to comprehensively physically destroy any logically damaged media. Because cheapskate researchers would routinely do stuff like fish discarded floppies out of the trash and use them for their data.
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Iām so happy it only took a very quick Google search to find this gem from my youth.
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Since Iāve met Whitfield Diffie, Iāll let him know 
(You donāt trust SFTP!? Well I donāt trust you!!)
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Yep. about 16-17 years ago I had an assistant that kept all her documents and templates on 3.5" floppies in a big filing cabinet. One document per disk. We had good, reliable network with 24-hour back-ups. She just couldnāt get her head around the idea of network-based storage and file organisation. She needed the reassurance of a physical thing. She was in her mid 20s.
Another guy (head surveyor), printed all his emails and kept them in a big folder. If he wanted to quote one, he would scan it back in from the paper copy.
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Our Facilities manager does this. She will rescan new emails to update her files even if the only thing in the response was a āthanksā.
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Ahhh, iomega Zip disks!
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Yeah, the system they have is pretty much hack-proof.
I had the SyQuest EZ 135 Drive ā I should fire it up and see if I can still read any of the discs.
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Wikipedia lists capacities hereā
It was my impression that 8 inch floppies in the late 1970s contained about a megabyte (512 kb per side)-- but obviously this depended on the machine you were using. You donāt happen to remember what system you used, do you?
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Is linking to John Oliver again redundant at this point? Heās just so darn entertaining.
I am inclined to agree that Iād rather see the whole nuclear system dismantled before someone tries to upgrade it to a system with any conceivable point of failure.
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I dealt with about a dozen of those formats in the late 70s and early 80s, both working as a computer store tech and in various programming jobs in college. I still have four 8" floppies, all from wildly incompatible systems.
The smallest was the original Shugart SA400 5" SSSD floppy, 35 tracks of 8 sectors of 256 bytes each, for 70K or storage. The 8" started as 77 tracks of 26 sectors of 128 bytes each, which is the format that System/1 used when it was invented by IBM. That could hold 2002 lines of text, which is exactly (+0.1%) one box of punch cards.
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They āfixedā the āclick of deathā problem - after losing in court - with mail-in rebates.
This was a company already infamous for simply not honoring its mail-in rebates. Iām pretty sure the CEO even got caught bragging about not honoring them.
More than anything else, the Zip disk as an emerging standard was killed off by Iomega themselves releasing competing non-compatible products.
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I still have my driveā¦somewhereā¦
My favorite band, KMFDM lost basically a whole album on a JAZZ drive that corrupted the sound files.
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