No. The first digital computer is usually considered the ENIAC (unless you are English), and announced in 1946. So depending on who you consider the first human computer generation, those born in 1946 or later, or those already alive in 1946 at some age, then we have a 70 year age of digital computers to assign some number of human generations to.
Good lord. I didn’t even know that people still used floppy disks in 2016… :eek:
You surprise me, and fight ignorance.
In the late 19th century the USN had a term for that, a “great repair.” It got around a Congressional reluctance to build new ships.
You can be sure that, if there’s a Lucrative Government Contract™ involved, there is going to be a firm somewhere that has made it worth their while to produce 8" floppy disks.
I’ve seen 1.44Mb floppy disks for sale recently in a well-known retailer here, and I was trying to think who on Earth would still be using them; I haven’t seen a computer with a functioning floppy disk drive in it for more than a decade.
(I know they exist, obviously, but my point is the technology has been obsolete for more than two decades.)
Man, can you imagine what being kept next to the Ark of the Covenant would do to magnetic storage media?
“Hey, boss? I’m trying to use some of those floppies they sent up from the warehouse, but when I try to access them, my monitor is filled with screaming, melting Nazis.”
“Yeah, that’s a known issue. Just reformat it, and you should be fine.”
FTR, what I hate about those new 1.44mb floppies is how SHITTY they are! So, won’t work at 1.44, so I’m trying to reformat them for 720k, theoretically letting them be half as good as they were designed to be. Nope. Less than 180k to make my old Tandy’s read them? Not a chance. You look at them and you can see through them. Rust is about the cheapest thing on this planet, but they can’t be bothered to spray enough on them that they’ll work. :mad:
What are you using them for, out of interest? I’m trying to think of something besides retro gaming or storing text files that the average punter might still be using 1.44Mb floppies for and not having a lot of luck.
Stop oppressing my dream! :mad:
I’m surprised they use floppies, but not magnetic media. Aren’t there still magnetic backup tapes that are really cheap per byte of storage if you buy in bulk, and keep better than optical and spinning-plate media?
We have some old HP and B&K spectrum analyzers at work which use 3.5" floppy drives for exported data. We don’t use them anymore, but I’m aware of some people who do.
I’m pretty sure the DOD has some low level clerk picking these things up off ebay. The history of the 8 inch disk was that it was introduced commercially in 1971 and production ran into the early 80’s. There are gazillions of these things out there and I’d bet many are in sealed boxes. I would imagine that at best the total number of DOD 8: based systems in place need only a few hundred of these floppies at any given time. There is more than enough out there in the secondary market to keep these machines going without starting up new production. If the media stays stable.
Somebody is probably still making them. The material may still be in use so there’s a machine to stamp out circles, and the cardboard cases can be manufactured anywhere. As someone already mentioned there’s going to be a lucrative contract for someone to supply new disks annually. Even if it goes out for competitive bidding no one is going to spend the money to gear up to make them so the remaining suppliers will keep raking in the costs plus every year.
I’m convinced that the only reason some people still have floppies that work is that there was a gradual decline in quality. Every floppy I own had bad sectors after a couple years, even though I kept them in a case designed for them–even if I never used them except once to copy off of them.
I think they bought a couple million of them when they set up computers with drives that used them.
Is it too late for my 15 minutes? I briefly worked on this system (as an enlisted programmer) 10-15 years ago. The mainframes themselves had hard drives, but the 8" floppies were necessary to load the software onto them. Our dev environment was an unimpressive modern pc running unix, emulating CP/CMS, which we accessed with 3270 terminal emulators. For whatever reason, when we were ready to load a build onto a floppy we had to send it via 2400 b/s modems to some mid-80s minicomputer that could work with the 8" drives.
Of course we knew how ridiculous it all was and would have loved to upgrade, but we just had enough money to keep the lights on.
Anyone have any questions?
I knew of companies running Series/1 mini’s long after their past due date. The problem with the floppies was the drive mechanisms - there were belts and cogs and gears and spindles etc. All those parts were literally disintegrating, especially the belts. This was back in 2002… I can’t imagine how the Defense Dept. can still keep them alive.
“60 Minutes” did a piece about this a couple years ago. In short, the computer system in the missile silos is designed to do that, and ONLY that, and is not connected to the Internet or any other system, to make it as hack-proof as possible.
Is that you, Theseus?
ETA: I see Senegoid made essentially the same comment a week ago. Ninja’d!
That trick wouldn’t work in the property-control and network-management regimes I work in, because (A) the auditors would also check the machine’s actual manufacturer and serial number for a match, so you’d have to alter that (which is hard to get away with), and (B) on the network, the switches would know I had a different network adapter (MAC address) than I had before and lock the machine out of the LAN.
But in a simpler time, a more innocent era, your cleverness could work.
I don’t know why anyone would be surprised to see the ever-expanding government-military complex trapped in this self-made, viscous cycle. Under the circumstances (many and varied), people should be happy their big-government and high-tech defense systems work at all. So what if an ancient (in relative terms) diskette holds data for a million-dollar ICBM?
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is always going to be the mantra in a budget-driven, politicized environment.