That’s not to bad. Wouldn’t be surprised if
they were still using 5 1/4 floppy’s.
Posted on 12/07/2013 8:53:47 AM PST by Hojczyk
The technology troubles that plagued the HealthCare.gov website rollout may not have come as a shock to people who work for certain agencies of the government — especially those who still use floppy disks, the cutting-edge technology of the 1980s.
Agencies are also permitted to submit the documents on CD-ROMs and floppy disks, but not on flash drives or SD cards. “The Federal Register Act says that an agency has to submit the original and two duplicate originals or two certified copies,” said Amy P. Bunk, The Federal Register’s director of legal affairs and policy. As long as an agency does that through one of the approved methods of transmission, she said, “they’ve met the statutory requirement.”
But the secure email system — which uses software called Public Key Infrastructure technology — is expensive, and some government agencies have not yet upgraded to it. As a result, some agencies still scan documents on to a computer and save them on floppy disks. The disks are then sent by courier to the register.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
You think you have storage problems, the Library of Congress tries to maintain original playback devices. So many file formats. So many codecs.
If it was a 3340-1 it would be about 350mb (half of one CD),, the biggest baddest hdd of that time was the IBM 3380-K , it held about 2.1 GB.
They keep promising we’re going to be upgraded to the more advanced IBM AT from our XTs. We can hardly wait. (We just got the fancy amber monitors,..those green ones were so ancient.) /s
But many many thanks to them and for what they do.
In the end, in a couple hundred years, all of it may be lost. Even photographs won't last forever.
Will probably involve some form of re-recording and conversion in order to preserve it well after the originals are lost.
Even printing out a digital picture will not last as long as a photo. The dies in your ink jet printer have a shelf life.
I wonder if i could get one of those machines just to check what’s on the old disks in the basement that i’m afraid to throw away.
And the 3M doesn’t stand for 3 Megabytes — not by a long shot!
Not certain why an OS installation requires a floppy disk. I am referring to XP. Haven't had to install Win 7 from scratch.
Who knows... maybe a floppy drive is easier to support, drivers, etc. than a DVD drive when installing the OS.
They say that over 70% of all silent feature movies are lost to time (flamable/decomposing nitrate film stock).
I’d bet that more that 50% of all website pages created between 1994 and 2000 are lost. And there are blogs, ramblings, personal history accounts, genealogical data, etc that was posted.
People take thousands of photos with digital cameras yet are not so prone to saving all of those images to some cloud storage or hardcopy.
I’ve never received numerous “cellphone photos” when the phone was lost/broken/stolen etc. before it was transmitted to me.
The current “documents” are prone to being lost within 20 years.
You can go to a antique show or yardsale and buy old postcards or photo albums. NO ONE will be selling an unwiped harddrive at a yardsale with the intention that you will be rummaging through the content.
Damn good wages for a teenager. Gold was $20 an ounce. So a teenager could make $1535 clear a week.
sarcasm> Thank goodness for the Federal Reserve and all the laws, control, taxes, and regulation that came with it over the last 100 years, got rid of that darned Gold Standard. /sarcasm>
In today's dollars I should have said.
Because all the money we spent to get 16 Trillion dollars in debt wasn't enough to to update office computers for 20 years.
We can have Mega-structure computer farms to spy on and collect data on US citizens, but somehow, agencies doing routine work are still on 486 computers with floppies. Progressive priorities.
Because all the money we spent to get 16 Trillion dollars in debt wasn't enough to to update office computers for 20 years.
We can have Mega-structure computer farms to spy on and collect data on US citizens, but somehow, agencies doing routine work are still on 486 computers with floppies. Progressive priorities.
What is not valuable to someone now might be valuable in a few years.
I have converted mag reel to reel tapes and old film movies. A “reel” pain. I have a movie projector and had to rent a reel to reel player. The equipment will be difficult to find in a couple of years.
Even hi-8 media and camcorders are obsolete. You can probably still find them on the Internet. and mini-DV?
It requires a bit of knowledge and maintenance.
And once converted digitally, it has to be maintained.
“Floppies? not large enough to do useful work today”
Which is exactly why they are in use!
Oddly enough, some of the earliest forms of photography can last MUCH longer than present-day films if they are not mechanically damaged. I have color photos from the 50’s that are falling apart.
I have 110 year old family pictures. Low technology rules!
Yes, for archival photos, your cannot beat black & white silver based photographs.
I still have some. And the computer that used them. Built it in 1982.
hee hee hee
Sorry. I missed your point. The color dies in photos has a limited shelf life. Black and white photos are the best.
Our wedding photo hanging on the wall an in the sun part of the day has faded almost to the point of being unrecognizable.
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