This will get mocked, but up until recently I still included 3.5" floppy readers on my whitebox machines, in part for the simple convenience of running Memtest86[+] without any fussing around - found it worked more consistently than USB booting. It was also handy for making boot disks for more ancient machines.
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.
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.
This will get mocked, but up until recently I still included 3.5" floppy readers on my whitebox machines, in part for the simple convenience of running Memtest86[+] without any fussing around - found it worked more consistently than USB booting. It was also handy for making boot disks for more ancient machines.
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....
Now please do the fax machines :)
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.
My fax line, which I need because my bank can't email me a wire payment notification, still gets spam.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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