Japan Bans Floppy Disks & The Last Floppy Seller Standing!

I recently bought a USB Mini Floppy drive. Not used yet but I figured it would come in handy at some point. I have a wee handful of 2000 ish minis both unopened and used. I have seen a couple cartons of nos unopened mini floppies in thrift stores but never bought (thinking they're still being made).
I already knew the guests response when asked about disk quality "1985 vs 2005"- it's exactly the same situation with anything electronic.
The cheapness began in around the mid 90s and gotten better or worse depending on your view ever since.
Poor quality raw materials then add in bloating the software with buggy constant updates.

I bought the last floppy disks in my town, mainly to do LABS...
...used one to flash the latest and highest grade image onto a motherboard; - the message came on to the screen on boot-up telling me to insert the latest and highest grade cpu and hit enter... - looool

Just to say Japan use to make a bunch of those things and now they get banned; well that is becoming a collectors item just like the 8 Track.

Just to say Japan use to make a bunch of those things and now they get banned; well that is becoming a collectors item just like the 8 Track.

I run my Amiga A500 (casemodded in big wooden cabinet) every day to write diary on diskettes, and it barely makes any problems (beside oxidizing contacts those need to be wiggled occasionally). They are not really unreliable. Crucial is if a disk fails with scratched surface (grinding noise), always immediately use a cleaning diskette with isopropanol, else the debris will pollute and ruin the next inserted disks. Also CDR are pretty reliable, but (like photographic film) they must be stored always away from light and ozone. Most of the CDR I burnt in 1990th were still readable. The most unreliable media is modern (MLC/TLC) flash/SSD, which is basically DRAM with 1 year refresh rate, i.e. data fades away if left unpowered for only few years (the newer/higher density and the more worn, the quicker it will die).

Clickbait. New policy in Japan means government agencies are no longer allowed to REQUIRE floppy disks. No actual purchase, possession or use of a floppy disk is criminalized.

I wish that word "Ban" was not so overused in what could only generously be called half truths.

I used to keep my Roms and emulators on them 😂still got ‘em

As for the Japanese Government case, it seems that they had to literally refer to FDs.
IMHO, however, the essence of the movement is about moving away from old implementations that do not make sense in this age - like fax that Japan is still deeply in love with.

8" floppies were never referred to as 8 1/4 " floppies.

Good avoiding an mini-ecological disaster

I use floppy disks for my Sony Mavica Camera, my Yamaha Keyboard w/Roland MIDI Recorder with floppy, and for my vintage PC games collection. In fact the Postal Annex in my town still sells floppy disks (Polaroid label) for a buck apiece. Many vintage technology collectors still use them to maintain their game collections and still store important documents on floppy as it is easy to remove and transport.

But I can see why Japan would ban them. They can't move forward with USB, and portable SSD's for easy storage options. But this is similar to Europe up until the early 2000s using audio cassette storage for small computers. It was cheap, reliable, and while slow, it worked well enough due to the very high cost of floppy drives in the 80s and 90s. Floppy disks still have a place at least for the immediate future. They certainly are used in enough vintage technology.

I bought some DVD discs that claim they last 100 years. Something to do with a law requiring that in Japan for archiving. I use it to backup my NAS data and family photos.

I inherited hundreds of Floppies my brother used for 3-D Modelling and animation in Lightwave 3-D, all kinds of models and textures and other files he made in the 90s. Most of them are 3M he prefered them.

They can pry it from my cold dead A drive! 😆

I'm concerned about another CrowdStrike like event.

Click bait should be banned.

I still use floppy disks for my various Commodore configurations. When I re-discovered these marveollous old machines, I had to find my old floppies from the first C64 we bought back in 1996. The floppies sat in the basement for more than a decade, and they still work. The only one that didn't was already marked as "faulty" in red pencil and we got it with the C64 stuff we bought back in '96. The rest are working like a charm!

I have a USB 3.5 floppy drive, but what I'd like to have is a USB 5.25 drive. Nothing like that out there that I can find.

That was a great interview. That owner has a nice sense of humor. Especially when he said he might kick the bucket before the disks will.

But how will I program my time-traveling prop plane to time trave!?

Next on the chopping block in Japanese government - fax machines! Seriously though, I work in a Japanese university and until very recently we were given the option to submit class improvement reports on floppy disc. I found Windows 98 for sale on floppies in a local electronics store about 10 years ago too, lol

How old are these machines in japan if they still using floppy drives?

8 1/4 floppies from the 1970s Lon. I used them back then.

Still use my floppies daily :)

This has been showing up in my feed for ages and I've been ignoring it. Finally watched it, and it is surprisingly interesting.

Some of those disks you're having trouble reading might be ok physically speaking. There's various forms of magnetic entropy that act over decades rather than years. Consequently It's recommended to REFRESH all data on Harddisks EVERY 3-5 YEARS. This process is long & slightly more complex than described here. But essentially, the data is read off the disk cylinder by cylinder, then written back. As the media itself is often still good, only the formatting and user data has faded through entropy.
Great Video !!!

good luck trying read SD floppies with these bullshit USB floppy readers

There were never any 8 1/4" floppy disks... they were 8" floppies introduced by IBM in 1967.

Around 2015 I did a project for a company that stipulated "No USB Ports Allowed".
They didn't need to transfer a lot of data so they didn't want to take the risk of someone sneaking in a virus on a USB memory stick.
I included an RS232 port on their hardware.


I've heard of saboteurs leaving a USB stick laying around somewhere so an unsuspecting person will try to use it and thus infect their company's computers.

There is a lot of old measurement equipment like VNA's that have floppy drives

At work place we still use 3.5 floppies for a couple of non computer machines.

No love for the SuperDisk LS-120? I still use my Sony FD cameras and occasionally my Panasonic LS-120 cameras, those were my go-to cameras until I discovered thermal instant print cameras.

FYI: You can get a 3.5in Floppy Disk SD Card adapter!

If I remember correctly, the first Linux Operating System fit completely on one floppy disc.

We have three C&C machines that run software off floppies. Our it guy had to go to a thrift store tofind a pc that would run win3.1 and floppies just to usewith these machines 😂

My wife has an older embroidery machine that has floppy disk or an older card reader on it. I had read where some would swap floppy drives out (if you could easily get to it and it was standard size/mounting points) with something like "GoTEK SFR1M44-U100 3.5 Inch 1.44MB USB SSD Floppy Drive Emulator Black" for around $30.00. You would then format and use a USB drive as a floppy disk. I believe you could formate the USB to have several "floppy disks" on it and you would use the button on the Emulator drive to cycle through them.

And yet they still transfer information between office blocks by carrying piles of printed paper.

Tom seems like a cool guy! Good stuff

Not sure why older storage tech that still works is considered "obsolete"

Using gb-sized SD memory cards for files that measure in the kb-size is... well, dumb.

Cool business. I think floppy emulation is probably going to be more viable for these long term legacy applications as you easily store your backups on a local network redundant HDD storage or cloud storage and copy over to a USB device or parallel interface controller.

Lon, this episode was having definitely giving me flashbacks from Stuart Cheifet's "Computer Chronicles" back during the digital revolution of the 1980s! Between your topic on floppy disks, your beautiful space shuttle photo on the wall, and the reboot on an Apple IIe, my thanks for your work.

Only thought which comes to my mind when I see floooppy is "good riddance"

I still have some floppies I need to transfer their contents. Good to know about the floppy to USB drives on Amazon. I do have old Zip drives.. I don't remember them too much, but they were required when I was going to University back in the 90's.

In other words.... Windows 95 is now useless. Unless you have FreeDos.

The ETC lighting console that we have at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is so antiquated, it still uses floppies 🤦🏻‍♂️

I put a lot of old data on Blu_Ray disks. Are they more reliable that CD's?

😂 application printers must be sweating because they know they are next.😂

I want spectrum +3 with 3" floppy drive, but where the heck am i gonna find 3" floppies?!?