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Fewer than 20 Boeing 747-200s stay in service worldwide, and solely in cargo or army configurations. The US Air Power operates six, two of them as Air Power One. It’s unclear whether or not they nonetheless use floppy disks, too, however the US army employed the even-older 8-inch floppy disks in its nuclear arsenal till 2019.
A number of different kinds of industrial plane additionally use floppy disks, together with newer variants of the 747 and the 767, older Airbus A320s, and a few enterprise jets equivalent to Gulfstreams constructed till the Nineteen Nineties. It’s attainable to improve from floppy disks to USB sticks, SD playing cards, and even wi-fi switch, however doing so may price hundreds of {dollars}—and imply making a change to one thing that, whereas archaic, is understood to work.
“There are another unusual evolutionary lifeless ends we discover ourselves tied to as a result of the whole lot has to bow to the gods of reliability in aviation,” says Brian Ford of ACI Jet, an plane upkeep firm primarily based in California. “We nonetheless use PCMCIA cards and Zip disks, that are tougher and tougher to search out as properly. We have now for much longer design cycles that at all times really feel like [they’re] getting additional behind shopper gadgets, however we’re catching up.”
Following the rodeo incident, Necaise determined to lastly improve, however to not a completely new machine—simply to a floppy-to-USB emulator. These gadgets price round $275 every, exchange the floppy drive with a easy USB port, and are custom-made by a handful of firms.
“Embroidery and CNC [computer-operated industrial tools for cutting materials such as metal or wood] are normally our largest consumers,” says Joshua Paschal of PLR Electronics, a Texas-based firm that sells emulators.
PLR created a couple of base fashions that may be configured to work on practically 600 machines. Their list contains looms, stage lighting consoles, circuit board printers, oscilloscopes, digital printers, electrocardiographs, vector sign analyzers, injection molding machines, tube and pipe benders, dicing saws, wire cutters, plasma cutters, metallic presses, sounds samplers, musical devices equivalent to pianos and keyboards, and pc floppy drives from the likes of Sony, Panasonic, and NEC—in addition to dozens of embroidery and CNC machines.
Most of those price hundreds of {dollars}, and a few aren’t even that outdated, so house owners will need to hold them round for so long as attainable: “Quite a lot of this gear was by no means upgraded to USB even when USB was predominant,” says Paschal. “They’re nonetheless caught with floppy drives, particularly embroidery machines. That left a giant alternative out there to improve these folks.”
Individuals come to PLR for upgrades not simply because they’ll’t discover disks, however as a result of they’ll’t pay money for substitute drives. “Even once we began promoting these gadgets 12 years in the past, floppy drives have been getting arduous to search out, so I can’t think about now,” Paschal says. Gross sales are dropping, however Paschal says the corporate nonetheless sells between 2,000 and three,000 models a 12 months.
The floppy disk might by no means really die out. “There are folks on this planet who’re nonetheless busy discovering and fixing up and sustaining phonograph gamers from 1910, so it’s actually arduous for me to consider that the floppy disk is simply going to completely disappear,” says Lori Emerson, a professor on the College of Colorado Boulder and the founding father of the Media Archaeology Lab.
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