They were not just any floppy but actually 8" floppies that the minuteman missiles used.
I've been heavily involved with computers since the mid 80s and I've never even touched one of those 8". I've seen one in a museum that's all. They were just a bigger version of the 5 1/4" floppy which I used loads and I still have most of them (and USB hardware to read them, the greaseweazle). But by the time the commodore 64 and the pc came on the scene the 8" was already obsolete. So much so that I've never seen them in the shop even back then.
I know some US home computers used them, like the IMSAI which featured in WarGames (nice tie-in with this post). But really, those 8"'ers are old.
I am curious how much of this is real. I mean, it's a great story, and it fits a bunch of tropes about ol reliable systems that don't need a-changin', but it seems crazy to put any actual information about the US's nuclear weapons' systems infrastructure in the New York Times. At least I hope everything in this article is fake, anyway.
Yes, they finally made it to ZipDrives! Now they'll be future proof for a long time. ;)
After building for just IoT stuff I really like things that work without changing for years. I can't imagine how change adverse nuclear weapons engineers and staff would be.
It's funny too that spy thriller movies always envision military systems as super futuristic and having cutting edge technology.
ill take zip or even floppy over most cutting-edge technology. You don't want your nuclear deterrent to have a dependency on AWS, they're bad enough at keeping things running when the country isn't getting nuked.
I don't remember how reliable floppy disks were but at least data integrity is a well-understood science so there should be no problem detecting corruption. The new system uses SSDs which could be a bit concerning, as they're known to be more prone to corruption than HDDs; however the same thing i just said about data corruption applies to SSDs as well so it's probably not a big deal.
On the other hand, the write amplification problem is very concerning and I can only hope that they're using full-disk encryption.
I think it's important to realize that there hasn't been a lot of meaningful advancement as far as software is concerned for at least a decade. Hardware never stopped getting better but that just enabled people to write bloated, unreliable software.
> “The Air Force completed a replacement of the aging SACCS floppy drives with a highly secure solid-state digital storage solution in June [2014],” Justin Oakes, a spokesman for the Eighth Air Force, said in an email. “This replacement effort exponentially increased message storage capacity and operator response times for critical nuclear command and control message receipt and processing.”
i wish more people understood that 'exponential' is a rate of change and no value can be said to be 'exponentially' larger or smaller compared to any another value.
I mean, I’m sure that he accidentally a whole word, but I do find it entirely possible to increase response times by leaving older systems. There was a certain immediacy to older tech that simply doesn’t exist anymore. I just hope that they didn’t move to a recent version of Windows with forced updates and whatnot, or a recent version of Ubuntu which defaults to unattended updates.
https://archive.is/eiXdI
They were not just any floppy but actually 8" floppies that the minuteman missiles used.
I've been heavily involved with computers since the mid 80s and I've never even touched one of those 8". I've seen one in a museum that's all. They were just a bigger version of the 5 1/4" floppy which I used loads and I still have most of them (and USB hardware to read them, the greaseweazle). But by the time the commodore 64 and the pc came on the scene the 8" was already obsolete. So much so that I've never seen them in the shop even back then.
I know some US home computers used them, like the IMSAI which featured in WarGames (nice tie-in with this post). But really, those 8"'ers are old.
I am curious how much of this is real. I mean, it's a great story, and it fits a bunch of tropes about ol reliable systems that don't need a-changin', but it seems crazy to put any actual information about the US's nuclear weapons' systems infrastructure in the New York Times. At least I hope everything in this article is fake, anyway.
I mean to be fair, the article didn't really mention anything more than surface deep.
Yes, they finally made it to ZipDrives! Now they'll be future proof for a long time. ;)
After building for just IoT stuff I really like things that work without changing for years. I can't imagine how change adverse nuclear weapons engineers and staff would be.
It's funny too that spy thriller movies always envision military systems as super futuristic and having cutting edge technology.
ill take zip or even floppy over most cutting-edge technology. You don't want your nuclear deterrent to have a dependency on AWS, they're bad enough at keeping things running when the country isn't getting nuked.
I don't remember how reliable floppy disks were but at least data integrity is a well-understood science so there should be no problem detecting corruption. The new system uses SSDs which could be a bit concerning, as they're known to be more prone to corruption than HDDs; however the same thing i just said about data corruption applies to SSDs as well so it's probably not a big deal.
On the other hand, the write amplification problem is very concerning and I can only hope that they're using full-disk encryption.
I think it's important to realize that there hasn't been a lot of meaningful advancement as far as software is concerned for at least a decade. Hardware never stopped getting better but that just enabled people to write bloated, unreliable software.
DoE used to make somewhat heavy use of Jaz drives
So what are they going to do with all their IRL save icons now?
Probably donate them to Boeing and Airbus so they can keep updating their avionics.
A tragic day for America. This new generation just doesn't appreciate floppy disks anymore.
(2019)
Paywalled. Did they moved to CD-ROM?
https://web.archive.org/web/20250627172026/https://www.nytim... for an archived version
> “The Air Force completed a replacement of the aging SACCS floppy drives with a highly secure solid-state digital storage solution in June [2014],” Justin Oakes, a spokesman for the Eighth Air Force, said in an email. “This replacement effort exponentially increased message storage capacity and operator response times for critical nuclear command and control message receipt and processing.”
I can't help but imagine this is just a USB flash drive.
Increased response times …
i wish more people understood that 'exponential' is a rate of change and no value can be said to be 'exponentially' larger or smaller compared to any another value.
I wish more people understood that metaphorical colloquialisms are not intended to be taken literally.
Luckily, he is not an engineer for the fire-nuke-or-nah module.
I mean, I’m sure that he accidentally a whole word, but I do find it entirely possible to increase response times by leaving older systems. There was a certain immediacy to older tech that simply doesn’t exist anymore. I just hope that they didn’t move to a recent version of Windows with forced updates and whatnot, or a recent version of Ubuntu which defaults to unattended updates.
(2019)
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21347890
And when you submitted it again a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37174838