Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for August 16, 2016

So Toby Harrah can’t play worth squat. There’s millions of talentless baseball players out there, but you don’t see them on Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

I grew up in the days of floppies and I thought were extinct or absolute already.

Ooooh your in trouble now with the Australian PC warriors. Ayres Rock was renamed Uluru (aboriginal name) years ago.

Reportedly, they keep using those disks and other old equipment because it’s hard to hack.

Wow, I knew they still used some ahem “Antiques” at the DOD. I stopped using floppies that size 29 years ago!I pray they are using them ironically these days and are launch codes are stored on a medium far more durable.Like a RLL or MFM form factor hard disk (not really!)

The Pentagon “lost” 6.5 trillion bucks but still they use 30 year old tech.

There was a report a few months ago about legacy systems in used by the federal government. http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-696T

Likely the Defense Department bought some hardware with proprietary software 35 years ago – and hasn’t upgraded it yet. They still keep records on microfiche!

Additional fact: the company the Defense Department buys them from charges 500 dollars per disk.

Toby: So what? When I was in little league, I had several games like that. Of course, I was in right field.

I’ll be honest…had to look up what a floppy disc is.

If you can’t make it to Australia, try Enchanted Rock, near Fredericksburg, Texas. It only rises 425 feet above the ground, but it’s pink granite, and looks magnificent at dawn.

An 8 inch floppy! Most of us are use to 5 1/4", 8 is even older. I wonder how they keep them from deterioration which any floppy is susceptible to.

Apparently the Defense Department believes if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

I may have an 8" floppy some where around here, but no drives. I definitely have a 2400’ 9 track tape from a Perkin Elmer mini-computer (which I definitely don’t have at home). I still have 5-1/4" floppy drives in one of my junk piles so I could likely still read those floppies I still have on hand. I recently purchased an external 3-1/2" floppy drive (with a USB connector) so I could capture some stuff from the big pile of floppies I still have in that format. I have a few other no longer used storage formats in the junk pile too. Somewhere around here I have a full height, MFM 5MB hard drive. I also had the interface card but I’m not sure I still do. The last time I remember seeing the hard drive I was using it as a door stop when I was stationed in Italy during the late 80’s, early 90’s..It’s amazing the amount of data we put on storage media assuming it will last forever. Between the changes in protocols, storage formats, hardware and software, it’s damn hard to keep from losing stuff to the rush of progress..My research paper for my graduate degree (‘94) was created using WordPerfect. I can’t remember if it was the DOS version or the early windows version… I really need to get that converted to a newer format before I loose it. Fortunately I still have a working copy of WP, but for how much longer? These days I use either OpenOffice or LibreOffice, depending on how I’m feeling at any given time. I"m hoping the open document format will have longer legs… 8^)

I had 5 inch, not 8. Wonder if they could use my old ones?