Happy Flashback Friday, Oilers! We've shown off quite a few different kinds of items and records that the Archive keeps over the last few years of Flashback Friday, but while going through our shelves we found a whole box filled with these relics of modern technology, filled to the brim with sports rosters, graphics, and recordings.
Floppy disks, created for commercial use in 1971 by IBM, can last for 10-20 years if stored properly, so maybe we can get these opened up one day! While some of you might not be familiar with floppy disks or though they'd gone the way of the Dinosaurs eons ago, that's actually not the case.
Despite Sony ending production of the floppy disk in 2011, there were so many manufactured that you can still buy unused ones today and there sure is a market for them! British Airwaves continued to use them until the early 2020s! And according to a BBC article Boeing still uses them to install software on some of their aircraft. The Muni Metro light railway in San Francisco also still uses them to help get people moved around the city. Many companies and government bodes still rely on them, but a lot are starting to phase them out, like Japan did as recently in 2024!
For archives, though, this means that we always have to be considering obsolescence of technology and how we can best preserve the data. Even now, CDs are being used less frequently as things move more onto the Cloud, and who's to say we'll continue to have access to DVD/CD drives in the future if the tools used to read them also stop being produced. Lucky for us, floppy disk drives still exist! Now if only VHS to DVD conversion was cheaper…