On December 27, 2021, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department lost some personal data from the Meguro district of Tokyo. Collecting these data is a necessary step in Japan's affordable housing review – the district government submits the personal information of the application for affordable housing to the Metropolitan Police Department, checks it in the database, and confirms that these people are not members of the underworld before the review can continue.
Supposedly, this kind of information communication problem between the administrative unit and the police should not have stirred up thousands of waves as it is today, but the loss of data was only because the police lost the floppy disk containing the personal information of these people.
Many post-00s young people may never have seen a 3.5-inch floppy disk. There was once a joke: a child found a floppy disk in his father's warehouse and asked why his father had so many 3D printed models of save buttons.
This probably explains how old this technology is.
From the 8-inch floppy disk in 1969 to the 3.5-inch floppy disk in 1981 (that is, the one that the post-80s and post-90s are more familiar with), and then to the 00s, which was basically invisible, the floppy disk with a final form capacity of only 1.44MB has completed its historical mission - it should be so.
But in fact, Japanese government agencies still use floppy disks extensively. On October 22, 2021, the Nikkei Shimbun reported that major administrative agencies in Tokyo were reducing the use of floppy disks.
Both the narrative of this report and the other articles mentioned later in this article will reveal a more or less mysterious caliber: "There are few problems with floppy disks, so they have been used until now." But in fact, the floppy disk is afraid of squeezing, shaking, and afraid of aging, and has long been discontinued, and the existing floppy disk will sooner or later all withdraw from the historical stage.
What's more, today's new computers are unlikely to be equipped with floppy disk bits, and even if floppy disks are forced to be used, additional reading devices need to be purchased separately. In a practical sense, there is no reason to use floppy disks at all. If you want to force a reason, you may say that "the capacity of the floppy disk is too small to fit into the modern computer virus."
What are the benefits of using a floppy disk, the technology is so backward, it can't be used in daily life, why not replace it? Let's first understand the history of floppy disks and see if we can find the answer from it.
In 1967, IBM's punch cards were still widely used for data entry and software programming. David S. L. Noble was assigned to lead an IBM project to develop an entirely new system for loading instructions and installing software updates on mainframe computers or other systems. After trying out a variety of options, the team came up with a "magnetically coated plastic disc" system, the first floppy disk capable of holding information from 3,000 punched cards.
▲ A punch card for Fortran programming (Source: Wiki)
diskette
In the early days of floppy disks, they were easily soiled. Herb Thompson and Ralph Flores came up with the idea of loading the disc inside a special cover with a novel plaster element. Since then, these disks have processed information much more efficiently and can be stored more securely without worrying about their exposure to dust or other harmful elements.
8-inch floppy disks and disk drives (Source: Wiki)
Considering that many companies still relied on punch card systems for data entry at the time, IBM set out to retrofit its punch card data entry machines so that operators could easily transfer data from paper cards to floppy disks. Soon after, personal computers began to take the world by storm, and the value of floppy disks was immediately reflected, and soon became the main form of data storage and transfer for small-scale systems.
Using floppy disks to load data into a computer is faster, less expensive, and more space-efficient than stacked punch cards. In 1976, Alan Shugart, co-inventor of floppy disks, developed a new 5.25-inch floppy drive for personal computers. This large floppy disk size was the industry standard until the second half of the 1980s, until sony's 3.5-inch floppy disk format (invented in 1981) dominated the market.
The technology of floppy disks has evolved over time. The first 8-inch floppy disk had a storage capacity of only 80Kb, and the later 3.5-inch floppy disk had a capacity of 1.44Mb. This bit of capacity is really insignificant for our current computers, but for people at that time, it was difficult for them to imagine "how much data" they had to use to fill this floppy disk.
Small with box
In the 1960s, Philips developed a small tape cassette (a plastic cassette with two small cassettes inside), an audio recording format. HP once used this format in its HP 9830 (1972), but the small band box didn't catch on until a few years later, when it became widely used for digital data storage, when computer hackers eager for cheap storage media took the lead. This storage medium was still prevalent among cheap computers in the late 70s and early 80s because the media and drives were very cheap (many computers could load and save data through a standard cassette player).
ROM cassette
The ROM cassette is a circuit board with a read-only memory (ROM) chip and an interface, encapsulated in a rugged housing. This cassette can be used to load games or programs.
In 1976, Fairchild Semiconductor invented a ROM software cassette that could be used in conjunction with the Fairchild Channel F video game system. Soon, home computers such as the Atari 800 (1979) and TI-99/4 (1979) adopted ROM cartridges for simple software loading and distribution. Lotus even developed a version of Lotus 1-2-3 based on a ROM cassette for IBM PCjr (1984). The ROM cassette is fast and easy to use, but the price is also relatively high – a drawback that determines its fate.
A variety of new floppy disks
In the 1980s, many companies experimented with non-traditional floppy disk formats. Such a "floppy disk" (top-middle) is not a floppy disk at all: ZX Microdrive tapes (sometimes called "ribbon floppy disks") have a ring magnetic tape inside, similar to an 8-track tape. Other experimental products in this area include Apple's FileWare, installed on the first Apple Lisa computer; a 3-inch micro floppy disk; and a rare 2-inch LT-1 floppy disk, which was used only in the Zenith Minisport portable computer invented in 1989. The results of other trials are applied to niche products, but none dominate the market as much as the 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppy disk formats.
compact disc
Originally a digital audio storage medium, discs were the product of a project between Sony and Philips that first came to market in 1982. This format stores digital data in the form of pits molded on the surface of a plastic disk backed by reflections. The laser reads the pits. Because optical discs are digital media, they are ideal for storing computer data. It didn't take long for Sony/Philips to change the format and develop computer CD-ROMs, producing the first commercial CD-ROM driver in 1985.
12 cm format discs have undergone further development over the past 25 years, resulting in higher capacity disks such as DVDs, HD-DVDs, and Blu-ray discs. More importantly, in 1988, recordable discs (CD-R) were introduced, allowing users to write their own data to the disc. In the late 1990s, as optical media became cheaper, this storage medium replaced floppy disks for most of the daily data transfers.
Magneto-optical storage medium
Like optical discs, magneto-optical (MO) disks are also designed to be optically read by lasers. Unlike discs and CD-R, which allow data to be written at all, and the latter only once, most magneto-optical disks allow users to write and erase data multiple times on disk. This is achieved with the help of a special magnetic process that works with lasers to complete data storage; various magneto-optical drives and disks are still being produced today, but become niche products due to their relatively low capacity and relatively high cost.
Emeca and Zip drives
In the '80s, Emedica entered the removable storage industry with the Bernoulli Box, which can store 10MB or 20MB of data on large disk enclosures. Later, this technology was improved with the introduction of the Zip drive (1994), which can store 100MB of data on an inexpensive 3.5-inch disk. People love this format because it's cheap and has a lot of capacity; Zip drives sold well throughout the 90s.
But the good times were short-lived, because CD-Rs could store more data (650MB); when the unit price of CD-R disks fell to a few cents, sales of Zip drives plummeted. With its 250MB and 750MB capacities, EMEGA tried to keep up with the times, but the winner was already decided: CD-R had already emerged as a winner. Zip has gradually disappeared into the long river of history.
Light floppy disk
Insight Peripherals introduced its first "optical soft drive" in 1992. It stores 21MB of data on a special 3.5-inch magnetic floppy disk. Unlike some non-traditional storage formats, this promising storage format is backwards compatible with traditional 3.5-inch floppy disks. The key to the large capacity of optical floppy disks is that the floppy disk-optical hybrid system combines traditional magnetic media with laser-based head tracking mechanisms (which can write data more accurately), so that there are more magnetic tracks on each disk (resulting in a larger amount of storage); but in the end, they all lose to CD-R.
NAND Flash
Toshiba invented NAND flash memory in the early 1980s, but the technology didn't catch on until the late 1990s when digital cameras and personal digital assistants (PDAs) hit the craze, and prices fell sharply. Since then, NAND flash memory has emerged in a variety of formats, from large proprietary cards (for early handheld computers) to PC cards, to flash cards, SM cards, secure digital cards, memory stick cards, and xD image cards.
Flash media is popular because it is completely solid and has no moving parts. Flash memory cards require only a small amount of electricity to work and are rugged; over the years, storage space has grown exponentially, while the cost of the media itself remains relatively low. The first flash memory card could only store 2 MB of data, and now the largest can store 1TB of data.
Mini removable storage disk
This press photo released by IBM/Toshiba is not about a capybarand-sized hamster, but about a tiny hard drive the size of a flash memory card called Microdrive. Introduced in 2003, these micro-hard drives were miniaturized to the extreme, once offering high storage capacity and performance at a very low cost, and later overshadowing those advantages with larger flash media.
Apple's iPod (2001) and other media players used similar spinning disk devices, but Microdrive was inherently unstable, power hungry, and limited storage capacity, which quickly frustrated device manufacturers. At present, this storage format has been eliminated.
USB flash drive
Computer users have been living in the USB era since about 1998. USB plug and play, easy to operate, which brings convenience to the life of each computer user, this advantage also extends to removable storage devices, U disk came into being. Compared with other portable storage devices, USB flash drives have many advantages: small space, usually faster operation speed (USB 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 standard), can store more data, and the performance is more reliable (due to the lack of mechanical equipment), disconnected during reading and writing without being easily damaged like floppy disks.
According to media reports, in 2019, the U.S. Air Force finally replaced its ancient 8-inch floppy disk drive system, which has played a vital role in the most important strategic system in the United States since the 1970s, which is the U.S. Air Force nuclear command system. In Gerald M. During president R. Ford's presidency, this then-"advanced" drive technology was used to issue winter emergency action directives to U.S. nuclear forces deployed around the globe. Today, these paper-wide floppy disks are eventually replaced by modern solid-state drive systems (SSDs).
Does the U.S. Air Force know that the system is already lagging behind? The answer, of course, is yes. The U.S. Air Force has long thought that this system is very old, but the maintenance personnel found that the system has always been running well, and the nuclear strategic system integrated with the floppy disk drive has also undergone a long time test and performed well, just as the so-called "lead the whole body", a system of changes will inevitably trigger the innovation of the entire system, which is one of the important reasons why this floppy disk system has not been upgraded. Indeed, if there is no major incident and can maintain normal operation, many systems are difficult to replace.
Source: Observer Network and other network content synthesis