this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 54 points 9 months ago (27 children)

What in the hell are they using them for? They hold so little data I don’t see how they can even be practical at this point.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (10 children)

10 to one they weren't, look how oddly this article is phrased. I'd guess there was a rule government offices had to accept floppy discs, have the equipment to read them, but the clients weren't actually submitting that way anymore.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Like, the first paragraph explains.

Until last week there were about 1,900 official governmental application procedures that stipulated businesses must submit floppies or CD-ROMs (specifically) containing supplementary data.

Not "the government had to accept them", but "businesses were required to submit them".

It's not a hypothetical problem, there was even news a few years ago about how businesses were complaining they had to send in a dozen+ disks at a time because of file formats.

The laws were written at the dawn of the digital age, in the 70s and 80s, stipulating specific storage media, and just never got updated because the government didn't view it as a problem.

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