Japan's digital minister declares 'war' on humble floppy disk in new digital push

The Japan Times ^ | August 31, 2022 | Bloomberg

[chajin]

Japan, land of yesterday's technology 🙄

[BBQToadRibs2]

I still have my hanko from my days in Japan.

[moovova]

Those floppies just aren’t suited for loading state secrets on...and selling them to China.

[dfwgator]

The Floppotron: Sweet Dreams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGfkPCZYfFw

[Leaning Right]

I’m running my home computer with punch cards. So I’m actually jealous of Japan’s advanced floppy disk technology.

[Dalberg-Acton]

I have some 3.5” floppies that have some family photos on them. I was able to recover the photos with a Bytecc BT-144 USB external floppy drive. I was even able to boot my computer into DOS with it.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Ah...the old days.

[Robert DeLong]

I’m actually surprised to learn that Japan still uses floppy disks.

[chajin]

I still have my hanko from my days in Japan.

Take it with you when you have tempura, and you can engage in hanko-panko

[Jonty30]

I’ve read that Japan might export 2020 technology, but they function as a society 40 years behind.

[Tell It Right]

In some ways using outdated storage mediums adds a level of security. “Security through obscurity” alone isn’t enough to secure a system, but it can be nice extra layer of security.

[chajin]

FWIW, Taro Kono is the fourth generation of Kono politicians, sorta like the Rockefellers in the early 20th century here. He’s almost certainly going to become the next PM, perhaps in Trump’s second term or when DeSantis becomes POTUS in 2028; their summit meetings will not need translators, since Kono-san speaks near-perfect English.

[EEGator]

How else can you play King’s Quest?…

[ConservativeMind]

I occasionally bought those.

[KarlInOhio]

I will send him a box of punch cards explaining the reasons that is a dumb idea. Don’t drop it or it will look like a Biden speech when you restack them randomly.

[Robert DeLong]

That's a very good point, and I agree wholeheartedly. 🙂

Nonetheless, it still surprises me. 🙂

[x]

Are you absolutely sure that the “Digital Minister” isn’t an animatronic robot or a hologram?

[PghBaldy]

It was fun inserting a black sheet of paper or two, and taping end to end to send to unfavored people ;)

[BBQToadRibs2]

“Take it with you when you have tempura, and you can engage in hanko-panko”

Ba-Dun ‘Tsss

[Myrddin]

My 1983 vintage TRS-80 Model 16A has DS/DD 8 inch floppy drives. I was having trouble finding floppy media. A solution was to grab a wire wrap perf board and create an adapter from 8 in DS/DD to 3 1/2" DS/DD floppy. It works fine. I can boot the machine and perform saves/restores to the drive. That solved my floppy media issue. The hard disk was a bit lame and was updated to a 750 MB device. I run Xenix on that machine. The C compiler was employed to build the Korn shell from source. I passed the necessary updates back to David Korn to improve the portability of his source. Ultimately, I did that for 30 platforms at PacBell.

I still have machines with floppy drives. They are useful for Intel motherboards that need firmware updates using a generic DOS image.