alt Hacker NewsIn fact, it's created a bunch of risks. Like the fact that nobody manufacturers floppy disks or floppy disk readers anymore.
I can understand not changing a system for change sake, but the floppy disk has been obsolete for nearly 20 years now. It's been hard to find a floppy disk reader for the last 10 years. Going so slow that you can't respond to that change is far FAR too slow.
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Linux 7.4 got fixes for floppy disk handling, as recently as yesterday!
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
A bit odd that they didn't at least update to using USB thumb drives. Those are readily available and at least as reliable as magnetic floppy disks.
It was bad enough in 1986 when F-16 pilots had to bring their own cassette players on missions.
I worked for a salesforce partner and we spent the two years I was there working with a large ag equipment manufacturer. They had two legacy systems that were still (as I was told) some combination of Fortran and early Unix systems. They had been reluctant to upgrade them because one of the their main manufacturing machines was still running on it and they were terrified if they upgraded and something went wrong, it would cost them millions in production time.
As you pointed out, you can't find floppy discs or disc manufacturers any more. I do remember one of the VP's of this company saying as long as they keep teaching Fortran to college engineers, they have no reason to upgrade yet. That got a few raised eyebrows from our team. We relented and upgraded what they were comfortable with - but man oh man it was quite the eye opener for me as a young dev how the thought processes of the people running these companies really are.