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Japan will no longer require floppy disks for submitting some official documents
Japan will no longer force businesses to put data on floppy disks when they submit certain official documents.
Japan’s Digital Minister is going to war against floppy disks and fax machines
Taro Kono wants to end the government’s stubborn reliance on outdated tech.
A Redditor is squeezing entire movies onto a single floppy disk
They made a custom VCR to watch them with as well.
Two classic RPGs are being ported to a 1980s Sharp PC
'Ys I' and 'Ys II' are getting their ultimate ports: to a PC platform from 1987, complete with 3.5-inch floppies.
TUAW TV Live: Dealing with old media and files
A lot of us who have had computers, camcorders, and cameras for more than just the last 15 years are faced with a real issue -- what to do with all of the physical media that piled up over the years. Today on TUAW TV Live, co-host Shawn "Doc Rock" Boyd and I will discuss how to go about getting that media moved over to a format that will work with your current OS X and iOS devices. Have old files that are from an application that no longer exists? We'll give you some tips on how to recover that information, too. To watch the show and take part in the chat, just scroll down a tiny bit, log into the chat room, and be sure to press the "play" button on the video window around 5 PM to watch the stream. If you don't have time to watch the complete show today, come back to this post later or first thing tomorrow when we'll have the recording available for your viewing pleasure. Contact the podcast Follow the hosts on Twitter: @stevensande, @docrock, @TUAW Send your questions to @stevensande E-mail us: tvlive at tuaw [dot] com
Capy Fine Racing GP is a game on a floppy disk at PAX East
We never believed that in the year 2013 we'd be talking about games found on a floppy disk, but Capybara Games has proven us wrong. The developer is bringing 3.5 inch floppy disks to PAX East housing copies of Capy Fine Racing GP – a new racing game featuring characters from games created by Capy and Double Fine.Capy co-founder Nathan Vella told Edge that both developers teamed up to create the game, which seems like an excellent offering for the two studio sharing booth space in Boston. The game itself is described as an "OutRun-style racer."If you won't be at PAX, the floppy disk will also be included in the 200 retail versions of the Double Fine/Capybara Games Steam collection. Those that get hands on the disks are encouraged to share."It's just something we did for pure fun and loving the idea of doing cool shit with our friends, in the spirit of the Capy Double Fine PAX combo. While it's totally a real game, it's also not at all a real game," Vella said.
Writer breaks down floppy drive history in detail, recalls the good sectors and the bad
There's been a lot of nostalgia circulating around the PC world in the past year, but there's only one element of early home computing history that everyone shares in common: the floppy drive. A guest writer posting at HP's Input Output blog, Steve Vaughan-Nichols, is acknowledging our shared sentimentality with a rare retrospective of those skinny magnetic disks from their beginning to their (effective) end. Many of us are familiar with the floppies that fed our Amigas, early Macs and IBM PCs; Vaughan-Nichols goes beyond that to address the frustrations that led to the first 8-inch floppy at IBM in 1967, the esoteric reasons behind the 5.25-inch size and other tidbits that might normally escape our memory. Don't be sad knowing that the floppy's story ends with a whimper, rather than a bang. Instead, be glad for the look back at a technology that arguably greased the wheels of the PC era, even if it sometimes led to getting more disks than you could ever use. Sorry about that. [Image credit: Al Pavangkanan, Flickr]
Apple Macintosh 128k prototype with 5.25-inch Twiggy floppy drive for sale on eBay
Apple's Macintosh took many forms over the years, from its initial concept by Jef Raskin as a $500 appliance that contained a built-in keyboard, printer and 5-inch display, to its ceremonious debut in 1984 with an inflated price that was five times this initial vision. For a period in the Mac's development, it was assumed that the computer would feature Apple's proprietary Twiggy 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, which also came as standard issue on the original Lisa. Just recently, an extremely rare prototype of the 128k Mac with a Twiggy drive has surfaced on eBay, but with an opening bid of $99,995, this antique is beyond what most of us could ever afford.While the Twiggy disk could store an impressive 860KB of data, it was also notoriously unreliable -- so bad, in fact, that one engineer responsible for the drive remarked to Steve Jobs, "Take out your .45 and shoot the friggin' horse in the head." Ultimately, the company did just that, and the original Macintosh shipped with a 3.5-inch drive from Sony that could write only 400KB to its not-so-floppy disks. While this prototype will attract only the most affluent of bidders, the rest of us can enjoy the priceless photos of what might've been.
IBM turns 100, brags about bench pressing more than companies half its age
IBM is quite possibly the only tech company around that might have genuine difficulty whittling a list of its industry defining contributions down to a mere 100. And it's an impressively diverse collection at that, including the floppy disk, the social security system, the Apollo space missions, and the UPC barcode. All of this self-congratulation is not without cause, of course. IBM was born 100 years ago today in Endicott, New York, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, a merger between three companies, all peddling different technologies. That diversity has helped define IBM from its inception, and has offered a sense of flexibility, making it possible to keep in step with technology's ever-quickening pace for a century. In 1944, the company helped usher in modern computing with the room-sized Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, and 37 years later, it played an important role in defining the era of home computing with the much more manageable IBM Personal Computer. In 1997, IBM introduced a machine that beat the world's reigning chess champion, and earlier this year, it created one that trounced two of the greatest players in Jeopardy history. These days, when the company is not building machines dedicated to outsmarting mankind, it's looking to promote sustainable development through its Smarter Planet program. So, happy centennial, Big Blue, and here's to 100 more, assuming your super-smart machines don't enslave us all in the meantime.
Modder miniaturizes 5.25-inch disk drive, brings microSD support to Atari 400
You aren't looking at a retro microSD card reader, you're looking at an Atari-compatible serial disk drive that just happens to use microSD in lieu of 5.25-inch floppies. In a Zork inspired fit of nostalgia (we've all been there), hardware modder Rossum paired up an Atari connector with a LPC1114 microcontroller, capable of emulating up to eight Atari drives, managed by a custom, auto-booting app. The whole package is neatly packed in to a tiny 3D printed replica of the original Atari 810 disk drive, and is available for sale never -- but don't let that stop you: Rossum's schematics are free for the taking. The word's biggest little Atari drive is just a DIY away. [Thanks, Francesco F.]
The floppy disk is dead (and Apple helped kill it)
It was 1998 and Apple had just released the iMac G3. It was a beautiful interesting computer: a sleek, all-in-one case, with something new called USB. One thing it didn't have was a floppy disk. At the time, many believed Apple was insane for leaving a floppy disk drive off the iMac, but did Steve Jobs care? Nope. The floppy was archaic technology to him. A CD-ROM drive was where it's at. Well, thirteen years later -- almost a decade after most people stopped using floppy disks, Sony, the inventor of the floppy disk, has officially announced that they are killing the 1.44MB storage device. As of next year, Sony will no longer manufacture the floppy disk. Most of my Word documents are larger than 1.44MB nowadays and I can't think of a single file I've created on my computer that I would need to transport to another computer, that would even fit on a floppy. Now that I think about it, I haven't actually used my Superdrive for reading or writing any optical media since I bought my MacBook Pro two years ago either. In another ten years, will optical media have gone of the way of the floppy? So, what have we learned? Steve was ridiculed for leaving the floppy off the iMac because he saw it as archaic. Now he gets to say "I told you so." If Steve does have the power to gaze into the tech future, Adobe should be worried about Flash going the way of the floppy, as Steve reportedly told the Wall Street Journal, dropping Flash is no different than the decision to drop the floppy drive from the iMac. Will he be right again? Only time will tell.
Sony shutting down Japanese floppy disk sales by March 2011, kills a tech dinosaur
Believe it or not, Sony managed to shift 12 million 3.5-inch floppy disks in Japan last year -- presumably to die-hard old schoolers. Alas, time waits for no one, and the venerable data transporter that started its life way back in 1981 is going to all but cease production by March of next year. Sony was the last of the major manufacturers to keep churning these bits of plastic out, but soon that too shall be no more. Having already shut down operations in most of the world, it's now noted the end of life for its domestic market, and thereby effectively consigned the floppy to the past. Good riddance, you might say, but we still remember fondly the wonder we experienced upon tearing apart our first 5.25-inch floppy disk. Ah well, the diskette goes the way of the cassette, guess that was predictable.
