This article comes from the Public Game Research Institute (ID: yysaag), author of the Tropic of Cancer, Ai Faner Authorized release.
The model worker in the storage medium has not left us, although the child has not recognized it.
▲ “The child said: You actually printed a save icon in 3D!”
What can I install on a 3.5-inch 1.44MB Floppy Disk? A not too big mobile phone wallpaper, half of the “Deer Ding Ji”, or one-third of the ordinary sound quality of “say not cry.”
In today’s era when the game’s capacity is tens of hundreds of G, it seems that everything has become distant and illusory. It was the earliest removable medium on a personal computer, from 1971 to 1996, from the first to=” 3.5-inch floppy disk that is about to retire, was the most reliable messenger of the nuclear arsenal”>
“Some people just like floppy disks.” Tom Persky once cites a court clerk’s example. The work based on transcripts makes him almost no need for capacity. He is used to using floppy disks. He thinks this is very useful. Convenient, so he will continue to use it.
Of course, few and few personal needs are not enough to support Tom Persky’s current floppy disk business, and some of the industries that still use floppy disks are the main reason why this industry still exists.
In the era of floppy disk market, tens of thousands of production equipment needs to be controlled by a computer with a floppy disk. These “high-tech” products have greatly improved the production efficiency at that time, and the service life of the equipment has reached 50 years. Unfortunately, the floppy disk cannot live so long.
The high cost makes it difficult for companies to make up their minds to abandon these hard-working old equipment. After all, they still work. As a result, buying and maintaining floppy disks for these old antiques seems to be a more economical option than the replacement.
After around 2010, when the floppy disk was about to be officially discontinued, Tom Persky did his best to purchase the last floppy disk. He worried that there were too many 3.5-inch floppy disks, but now he finds himself too Conservative. With the exhaustion of supply, the withdrawal of competitors, the buyer’s market has become a seller’s market, his investment has been rewarded, and FloppyDisks.com has become the world’s largest floppy disk supplier. In order to increase inventory, he even further carried out the business of recycling floppy disks.
But the return light will stop here. The times are improving, and the floppy disks that have been discontinued are sold for one less. The days when the floppy disk officially withdrew from the historical stage are approaching day by day.
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In 2014, CBS produced a well-known American TV show “60 Minutes” disclosure, In the US Air Force’s Strategic Automation Command and Control System (SACCS), the computer that is responsible for communication is actually the IBM Series/1 introduced in 1976 – which means they need to use an older 8-inch floppy disk than a 3.5-inch floppy disk. To read confidential documents.
It is hard to imagine that this military system that controls intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear bombers, mainly used to transmit emergency operations messages to nuclear weapons and fire weapons instructions, has been using floppy disks to transmit information.
According to the response of the US military at the time, floppy disks and related science and technology have stood the test of time, and they hope to ensure the highest reliability and performance when operating this critical weapon. This communication system does not have access to the Internet, has no IP address, and is almost impossible to be attacked by hackers. Therefore, even if they are “old”, they are more inclined to use it.
Unfortunately, this rhetoric did not touch the US government. In 2016, the US Government Accountability Office issued a report saying that taxpayers need to spend $61 billion a year to maintain the old technology systems in government departments. As a result, the hardware of these systems is becoming more and more difficult to purchase. Second, the new generation of technical maintenance personnel do not know how to repair these ancient equipment. Compared to investing in modern information technology systems, the cost of maintaining an old system is three times higher.
For the US nuclear weapons force still using the floppy disk of the last century, US Defense Department spokesman Valerie Henderson said: “This system is still in use, in short, because it Can still be used.”
In order to reduce maintenance costs, the US Department of Defense finally decided to upgrade SACCS’s modern digital equipment and plan to replace all of these floppy disks with more secure storage media by the end of 2017.
However, this work seems to be more difficult than they thought. Until June of this year, the 8-inch floppy disk was officially retired from SACCS, replaced by the already popular SSD.
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Compared to the United States, Japan’s “nostalgic complex” is heavier. According to the Nikkei report last month, in Japan, not only small and medium-sized manufacturing, but even large companies in the automotive field are looking for computer repair shops to renew old computers, including 30 years ago equipped with 5.25 Inch floppy computer.
As mentioned before, the cost of a very expensive production equipment is not short, and the cost of updating tens of millions of yen will often discourage companies. The production equipment is not updated, and the computer it is equipped with does not dare to update it. As a result, “seam stitching for another three years” has become a true portrayal of Japanese manufacturing.
The production equipment retention period issued by the Japan Machinery Industry Federation in JuneAccording to the fact-finding survey, the number of production equipment imported into Japan for more than 30 years has reached 19.1% of the total. It can be imagined that there are still many companies in Japan still using computers equipped with floppy disks.
Although it is barely enough, these old operating systems can’t be updated, and the latest control software can’t be installed. It’s not only difficult to repair, but once connected to the Internet, it is easy to be attacked by viruses. In the long run, upgrading these old computers as soon as possible is the way out for Japanese manufacturing.
The high-welfare Nordic countries may have to upgrade their hardware faster, but probably not much faster. Until 2015, Norwegian doctors received a 3.5-inch floppy disk from the Norwegian Health Authority every month.
In Norway, every citizen chooses a doctor as their daily doctor, and the corresponding records between citizens and doctors are maintained by the government. Since citizens can switch to any doctor who has space at any time, the government needs to constantly send the doctor a list of citizens it is responsible for.
In order to avoid leaking patient information and to save money, the Norwegian government finally chose a floppy disk with a small but sufficient capacity. In fact, until 2016, the Norwegian government gradually began to stop floppy disks, forcing doctors to use the electronic patient note system. Norwegian doctors have finally embarked on the information superhighway.
It’s a natural matter to replace a floppy disk that has already been eliminated, but it is often not easy to implement.
A lot of people may know that most aircraft are using a floppy disk to load the database, and the navigation database files can only be loaded into the aircraft’s onboard navigation database via a floppy drive.
However, the floppy disk has a small capacity, and it is easy to age out after a long time. In order to solve this problem, 2Shandong Airlines, which successfully implemented the U disk loading navigation database in 016, was quite a waste of effort:
It’s not as simple as a personal computer, and there are more things to worry about in the entire enterprise and even in the industry. It takes more time and money. The reason why the floppy disk that was announced to be discontinued around 2010 has been able to stand firm is not because its quality is high or people are reluctant to rely on it, just because it is sometimes too much trouble to train new people to work.
▲The crew uses the U disk to load the database
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In July of this year, Linux made a decision not to continue to support floppy drives. .
In this Linux kernel submission, Linus Torvalds, the founder of the Linux kernel, marked the floppy drive as “orphan.” This “orphan” is different from what we sometimes encounter in competitive games. It means that no developer is currently able or willing to support this part of the code. Such as