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US air traffic control enters the 21st century, starts to abandon floppy disks
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2026
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Technology
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Floppy discs reliable? I remember mine not working if I transported them in my backpack when it was cold outside. They came back to life when "thawed", but I'd prefer airliners use something better!
Clay slates have rather modest data density, but reliability is top.
Oh yeah then where are the other parts of the Gilgamesh saga? Check mate big slate.
You don't have copyright-scmiopyright permission to read it anyway. It isn't in the public domain -- 100500 years haven't passed for that.
These don't get transported like that. We're talking climate control and backups and so on. It's reliable because the failure rates and causes are known and accounted for.
You don't understand what I mean, floppy discs lose memory easily. It's not a safe storage medium. Everyone who has used them knows this. Use the paper with holes in instead 😁 can't be that hard to push some kilobytes onto it 😂
Lol.
I started out on 8" floppy disk back in the day when disks were actually floppy. Switch to 5.25" and then 3.5" before going to CD-ROMs.
Back then people were storing them in paper sleeves (or cardboard) and your average kid was handling them with dirty hands and ignoring pretty much anything and everything that caused them to degrade including touching the interior film. I fondly remember using the spring loaded shutter or a 3.5" as a fidget toy.
I'm well aware of the failures these things have and the way they are required to be kept to account for that including backups, and care instructions.
The point isn't that they fail. They have known failure rates and known failure causes. Protocols can be put in place to account for literally all of that and this is what makes the medium reliable and cost effective for this use case.
You're talking to someone who was loading navigation data and software updates onto planes with 3.5" floppy until fairly recently in their career.
This is as much about the hardware in use as it is about the storage medium. Upgrading depends on some things.
Cost
Upgradability path availability over full on replacement and the downtime of doing so.
The ability to make what you are upgrading to stable, secure, and backwards compatible to a degree.
All of those things have to be taken into consideration and accounted for.
https://vger.to/infosec.pub/comment/24545251
Lol I'm a senior software engineer and I used 5" floppies I mean it was in my post if you read it or maybe it's your memory that has run its course 😱 (BTW people ruined floppies putting their thumb on the read area, or ruined them by fidgeting with the 3"5 ones, what's your point about that?) no need to come to the rescue of an ancient crap organisation (computer wise) or is it yours or something 😂
One of us works in this industry and understands what's going on and the other of us is currently trying to throw their weight around because they didn't like an anecdote and didn't read the article.
If we're going to start throwing around ageism, I'm done with this conversation. You have a nice day.
Yeah goodbye goalpoast shifter lol.