My friend’s dad has a CNC machine that requires floppy disks to load the design patterns. He’s worried that a mechanical failure of the disk drive will eventually be the end of it, rather than the machine itself being obsolete. It’s been going strong for almost 40 years now.
Almost 40 years, so it’s been running since the 80s? Damn, older than Windows.
It might be possible to buy an old floppy drive off ebay and switch out the broken one of that happens, as long as there are no proprietary connectors and such…
Compaq would like a word.
Ah yes, Compaq, the company that used non standard power supplies but with the standard wire coloring and connectors. I had several customers blow up their motherboards after buying standard replacement power supplies.
GoTEK SFR1M44-U100 3.5 Inch 1.44MB USB SSD Floppy Drive Emulator Black https://a.co/d/hJwq736
Look for usb floppy emulators, you can have the floppy images in a usb flash drive. No moving parts or need to find expensive floppies.
If this thing relies on floppy, I don’t imagine it would be USB compatible