[HN Gopher] The floppy disk refused to die in Japan
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The floppy disk refused to die in Japan
Author : elorant
Score : 22 points
Date : 2024-01-28 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| Solvency wrote:
| As does the fax machine. Japan is stuck in time for deeply
| entrenched cultural reasons not soon too change.
| reaperducer wrote:
| "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... Floppy disks and "ain't broke" on the same phrase is
| an unusual combination.
|
| But then, most of the times people use that phrase something
| is obviously broken.
| thenanyu wrote:
| It's what makes it such a charming place to visit.
|
| China has now far surpassed it as cyberpunk society of the
| future, but Japan is basically stuck at what we thought the
| year 2020 was going to be like in 1980
| GuB-42 wrote:
| That's because fax machines in Japan were much more widespread
| than in the west. It is easier to let go of fax machines if you
| don't really use fax in the first place.
|
| One reason I heard is that in Tokyo at least, the usual way to
| communicate a location is to draw a map, often with directions
| from the nearest subway station. Postal addresses are hard to
| work with as most streets are unnamed, and usually, only local
| postmen and policemen can comfortably navigate with them. These
| maps were often sent by fax. Maybe kanji has to do with it too.
|
| Also, it is common for people who have good access to at a time
| modern technology to take more time to get to the next advance,
| may even skip it entirely. For example Japan was along the last
| in the technologically advanced world to get to smartphones,
| because they already had really advanced featurephones while we
| were stuck with Nokia 3310s. So while for us, the first
| smartphones brought us a lot, for them, it was in many ways a
| downgrade.
|
| So, for us, email was a replacement for slow and expensive
| mail, for them, it was a replacement for already pretty fast
| and effective fax machines. There is less of an incentive to
| change.
| Solvency wrote:
| "Postal addresses are hard to work with as most streets are
| unnamed, and usually, only local postmen and policemen can
| comfortably navigate with them."
|
| Another example of a silly and easily fixable problem that
| will likely also go unresolved for years for the same
| cultural reasons.
| rasz wrote:
| So everybody knows about 3.5 inch HD 1.44MB floppies, first
| introduced in 1985 by NEC inside PC-8801 mkII MR. IBM followed
| two years later switching PS/2 to 2HD floppies, Apple in 1988. 80
| tracks ~50KB/s speed.
|
| Much less known is ED 2.88MB. Only ever shipped in some 1990 IBM
| PS/2 and NEXT computers. 80 tracks ~100KB/s speed.
|
| But pretty much nobody outside of Japan has ever hear about
| 'Triple' or '2TD' format developed and shipped by NEC in 1988
| inside PC-88 VA3. 13MB unformatted, _9MB_ formatted capacity!!
| Triple because it tripled track density from 80 to 240 while
| reusing ED barium ferrite magnetic media, same ~100KB/s speed.
|
| Could you imagine a world where we got 9MB ~100KB/s speed floppy
| drives in ~1990 in all computers?
| crq-yml wrote:
| Ah, that would have made DOS game piracy so much easier.
| johnea wrote:
| I don't really see the problem with contiuing to use any
| particular tech.
|
| If it's not borken, don't fix it...
| bicx wrote:
| Using a rock to drive in a nail technically works. However, if
| you want to build a house in a reasonable amount of time, using
| a rock to drive your nails _is_ a broken approach if it can't
| keep pace.
| thrwwycbr wrote:
| A couple years ago Panasonic and Sony partnered with the Japanese
| government to come up with an (alternative) standard that's
| similar to m-disc in its properties.
|
| The standard that they came up with is called "Archival Disc"
| (AD) [1] and they fulfill the requirements of 100 years (lab
| tested and verified) data retention. The ODA units, however, cost
| over 8500$ last time I checked.
|
| As far as I know you can order them from the Panasonic Japan
| website and not anywhere outside Japan, but this standard has
| huge potential in my opinion (when compared to the absurdly
| overpromised mdisc, for example).
|
| Data retention rates matter, always have an optical and a
| spinning HDD backup. SSDs are not guaranteed to keep data longer
| than 30-90 days without electricity.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc
| Symbiote wrote:
| > SSDs are not guaranteed to keep data longer than 30-90 days
| without electricity.
|
| SSD retention claims vary depending on the drive; and it's a
| trade-off between speed, durability, total writes, etc.
|
| At reasonable room temperatures, powered-off SSDs will keep
| data for years.
| thrwwycbr wrote:
| Well, most vendors argue with losses of around 1-2% of data
| per year if you read their specifications.
|
| Losing a single bit is unacceptable for archival purposes,
| that's why I mentioned the importance of optical and magnetic
| backups as a redundancy.
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