US nuclear weapons command finally ditches 8-inch floppies
The disks are part of the command centres that run the country’s nuclear missile deterrent on behalf of SACCS. Continue reading US nuclear weapons command finally ditches 8-inch floppies
Category Archives: floppy disk
The Legacy Of The Floppy Still Looms Over Windows
We no longer use floppy disks on the vast majority of computers, but a recent Old New Thing blog post from Microsoft sheds light on one of their possible unexpected legacies. It seems Windows disk cache items expire after two seconds, and as the post explains this has its origin …read more
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Retrotechtacular: The Floppy Disk Orphaned by Linux
About a week ago, Linus Torvalds made a software commit which has an air about it of the end of an era. The code in question contains a few patches to the driver for native floppy disc controllers. What makes it worthy of note is that he remarks that the …read more
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From floppy disks to deep freeze: what’s the best way to store data?
Still got a Zip drive? What about a CD? Are you sure you’ll be able to access the data stored on those? We take a look at what’s being done to keep information safe for future generations Continue reading From floppy disks to deep freeze: what’s the best way to store data?
The World’s First Ransomware Came on a Floppy Disk in 1989
We may think of ransomware as a modern invention, but the genius idea at the centre of it dates back more than two decades. Continue reading The World’s First Ransomware Came on a Floppy Disk in 1989
An Eight Inch Floppy For Your Retrocomputer
For people under a certain age, the 8 inch floppy disk is a historical curiosity. They might just have owned a PC that had a 5.25 inch disk drive, but the image conjured by the phrase “floppy disk” will be the hard blue plastic of the once ubiquitous 3.5 inch disk. Even today, years after floppies shuffled off this mortal coil, we still see the 3.5 inch disk as the save icon in so many of our software packages.
For retro computing enthusiasts though, there is an attraction to the original floppy from the 1970s. Mass storage for microcomputers can …read more
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