Industrial Solutions

Where’s the replacement?

On Saturday (April 24) the Japanese Newspaper Mainichi Daily News reported that Sony would stop its production of 3.5 inch diskettes (Floppy Disks) by the end of its current business year in March, 2011. The report spread like a wildfire in the media and particularly throughout the web. (Refer to reports in the portals of cnet and BBC.)

Sony released its first 3.5″ floppy disk in 1981 (in those days with only 720 KB memory space). The gradual decline of the 30-year old data carrier had already begun several years ago. The respective disk drives have practically disappeared from current PCs.

But what is going to happen to all the old machines, systems, measurement devices, electronic musical instruments and similar devices? This haunting question is recently being heatedly discussed in a lot of forums and blogs.

Diskettes are still being used as the main removable memory carriers, especially in the industrial production sectors, but also in many smaller facilities such as robot controls and lab instruments. In many cases this is not even due to aging machines, but actually because manufacturers want to keep their systems supplied with the proven, stable, and compatible disk drives.

We are offering a most practical and cost-effective way out of this dilemma – the ipcas Floppy Emulator! It provides you with a brilliant alternative if you want to keep your old systems up to date.

All you have to do is replace the legacy disk drive in your system with the ipcas Floppy Emulator and you can then simply use an USB pen drive to replace your old floppies.

What experiences have you made in recent years with floppies and old disk drives? Just tell us where you are still using floppies or cannot do without the old floppy disk drives. Please consult us – no strings attached. We’ll be sure to find the best solution to suit your individual requirements.