[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.

[Jonty30]

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

[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?…

[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.

[PghBaldy]

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

[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.

[BenLurkin]

The world was a better place with yesterday’s technology.

Heck, it was a better place with the technology from the day before yesterday.

[TangoLimaSierra]

. Hanko stamp.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

hanko stamps are not going out of fashion anytime soon.

Say a package is delivered to your door. Instead of signing for it, you just use your little stamp to indicate receipt.

Think of a rubber stamp with your signature on it, but with a face about the size of a dime.

[Libloather]

[MayflowerMadam]

What about mag cards?

[zeugma]

Dealing with older tech like this is an interesting problem. Another is that you pretty much have to eventually transfer data to newer formats. This is a huge issue. Let's say you had some corporate data that was stored on floppies. As technology advanced, if you didn't want to lose that data, you needed to copy all of the data to new media. My personal progression for this kind of thing was from floppies to cdroms, then from cdroms to DVDs. Now I pretty much use hard drives for long term archival, though for some really important stuff SD cards are preferred.

One issue that you run into is finding older data. You have to file things intelligently, or the data might as well not exist, because you can't locate it when you need it. The amount of data lost either because the old media became corrupted, or simply can't be located is pretty much incalculable. This has always been the case, even when stuff was on paper. Unless the data is well organized, it can never be located. It is also susceptible to damage to water, fire, mold, and other stuff.

NASA has lost so much data due to bit-rot while records were sitting on old 1/2" and 9-track tape, that's its really not funny.

This is an ongoing problem in society. Sometimes, important stuff is lost due to mismanagement, sometimes it's not so important. I have a couple of old tapes (IIRC, they were QIC tapes) that I would really love to get transferred to something newer, but basically lost out because the window on the tech pretty much closed before I could do so unless I want to spend stupid amounts of money attempting to recover it.

Things like real estate transaction records (which are necessary to get clear title) have pretty much vanished into digital smoke because people weren't thinking ahead about data preservation.