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A comment on FAA Begins Retiring Decades Old Floppy Disks from Air Traffic Control. Parent comment

Re:FAA Begins Retiring Decades Old Floppy Disks from Air Tra... by wat10000 on Friday November 06, 2026 @11:41AM (#50394728)
According to this article, it's far worse than that: eight inch floppy disks! Capacity might be as much as 1.2MB per disk, but probably less. https://simpleflying.com/americas-atc-floppy-disks-12-billio...
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Re:FAA Begins Retiring Decades Old Floppy Disks from Air Tra... by SoftTalker on Friday November 06, 2026 @01:49PM (#50396586)
Aha so that answers my question about why they haven't at least switched to USB thumb drives for their sneakernet. These aren't PCs. Probably minicomputers such as a TI-990 or similar.
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Re:FAA Begins Retiring Decades Old Floppy Disks from Air Tra... by dboreham on Friday November 06, 2026 @05:44PM (#50399494)
That said the 3.5" drives were actually electrically compatible with the double density 8" SA-800 drives.
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Re:FAA Begins Retiring Decades Old Floppy Disks from Air Tra... by myrandomcomment on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:15PM (#50400318)
If anyone wants to see the guts of an 8-inch drive and how complex it is check out this video from Adrian's Digital Basement.

https://youtu.be/hQY0DI7nKaM

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Re:FAA Begins Retiring Decades Old Floppy Disks from Air Tra... by newsoftheday on Saturday November 07, 2026 @12:46PM (#50406454)
Can't believe how interesting watching that was, thanks. I learned about GreaseWeazle which I might use one day to backup some of my old copy protected disks.
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