Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks (2019)

nytimes.com

53 pointsvoxadam40 comments

Article from 2019.

https://archive.li/2022.03.08-114925/https://www.nytimes.com...

This might be controversial, but I don't see anything inherently wrong with non-networked computer systems using old tech. I think a lot of tech nerds see the tech as the sole capability of a system, ie 2x the clock speed is 2x the capability, but that's just not how real world systems work. The biggest issues seem to be getting replacement components as systems age or new systems are purchased (like with the scaling of FGM-148s for Ukraine).

I worked at a place that bought 5.25 inch floppy drives on ebay since they can't be bought new any more. Seems like a huge supply chain risk.

>anything inherently wrong with non-networked computer systems using old tech

>biggest issues seem to be getting replacement components as systems age

Well, there is one inherently wrong thing about old tech right there :)

Nothing lasts forever. Things need to be fixed and patched continuously, (especially since floppy disks aren't exactly known for their durability) and at some point it's just not cost-effective or even reliable to maintain the old tech anymore. Eventually, a non-networked system will have to be upgraded with newer hardware.

“The Air Force completed a replacement of the aging SACCS floppy drives with a highly secure solid-state digital storage solution in June,”

Sounds like flash drives. Perhaps even USB.

Pretty sure they went with the higher capacity Iomega Zip Drives.

Someone has to stand a foot away to catch the disk as its hurled out when ejected.

So funny enough, I checked and those are actually still for sale brand new. I feel old.

The sources I could find say that they didn't replace the computers accessing the data. They are still IBM Series/1 [1] machines. So whatever is being used, there has to be some kind of floppy (or tape, etc) emulator in front of it.

It's likely the floppy drive in question was an IBM 23FD "Minnow"[2]. The capacity and timeframe matches up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Series/1

[2] https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=885

The US military after using 37 different shell companies to purchase hundreds of gotek floppy emulators and 5.25" to 3.5" drive brackets:

> Damn I'm good at modernization

Well, they will also need 8" to 5.25".

those were 16-bit machines so perhaps they have to find aging flash drives smaller than 2GB?

EPROMs, and the UV lamp is locked in a cupboard with a highly secure combination lock

> secure solid-state

Or a CD

There is a reasoning fallacy that bugs me.

Just because one part of a system is really old does not mean that system is not a good system.

If floppy disks worked for the strategic arms boys, good for them.

I have seen a school tear out PCs in 24GB of RAM and 500GB SSDs (this was in 2016) because they also had PS/2 ports. (These were Dell Precision T3500 workstations.) They decided PS/2 ports were obsolete. They replaced the PCs with new PCs with processors that had slower benchmark scores than the old PCs and that only had 8 to 16 GB of RAM. At least they did not have the obsolete and unused PS/2 ports!

This same fallacy led General Motors to stop making the beloved full-size, rear-wheel-drive, V8 powered Caprice and the equally beloved S10 pickup. A few people poked fun at beloved and profitable products, so they had to go. This is the same fallacy, but I am not describing it correctly.

Getting rid of something functional, that may be the best product ever made for that specific application, because it has a feature or two that people make fun of, is absurd.

The great Chevrolet Caprice was criticized as a gas guzzler, but it got better mileage than the SUVs that replaced it. It was the most comfortable car in the road, which was a great boon for people with back problems who had to drive long distances. It was faster and more stable at high speeds than any tiny import sports car.

I wish we taught cost-benefit-analysis in elementary school. I wish people could see the way to judge a product line is whether it meets a need and therefore turns a profit.

I am tempted to publicly lament that it is illegal to hang MBAs and attorneys.

Can we buy decommissioned nuclear floppy discs? I'd like a framed one on my wall.

As cool as it would be, those discs were probably pulverized into atomic dust just in case they had any recoverable secrets on them.

Is it safe to breathe that dust? I'd like the smell of nuclear floppy in the morning.

Depending on how the microplastics were disposed of, you may already have fragments of the nuclear floppies in your bloodstream.

If you ever have feelings of self doubt remember you are partly made of nuclear bomb code plastic

I mean, what is on them?

If I saw a James Bond film where someone broke into someone's house to steal a framed decommissioned 8-inch floppy off the wall in order to obtain valuable nuclear secrets, I would call it far fetched.

What's funny is that the floppy discs they used weren't the 3,5" hard ones people remember from the 90's (the save button icon) but the old 5,25" ones that were actually floppy. That was some ancient shit.

The 8 inch floppy disks are extremely reliable, possibly because the areal density is so low.

Source: friend who is a curator of a computer museum who has old IBM midrange like System 36 and other floppy drives that he uses all the time.

Weren’t they ever bigger than that? I have a vague recollection that it was some sort of 8” oddball format. Maybe even a one-off?

8" was the standard size before 5.25" became the norm. Which happened because of the IBM PC using them as standard.

Apple, Commodore, Osborne and others were using 5.25" disks at around or before the IBM PC came into play. IBM used 5.25" drives in the PC because they were inexpensive, reliable commodity hardware, much like the rest of the IMB PC.

I learned to edit on a Grass Valley that used the 8" floppies. It was the only real world experience I had with them. The only thing the system wrote to the disc was text based EDLs, and it still took forever. Get a cup of coffee slow. Best of my knowledge, there was never an upgrade for this, and it was still in use when I left in the early 2000s. This was at a time when NLEs were still considered offline quality only, and this system was used to do the final online edit from the tape sources.

And just to point out, the logical capacity of those disks increased with each physical reduction. Nearly doubling each time. (The best 8" disks had about 1/2 of the capacity of the worst 5 1/4" one, and the best 5 1/4" disk had about 1/2 of the capacity of the worst 3 1/2" one.)

I guess even if IBM didn't put it on the PC, everybody would migrate into 5 1/4" disks on almost the same timeline. Those changes were very compelling back then.

The standard 8" floppy by 1980 was 2MB, 5.25" never beat that, and 3.5" only beat that technically, 'ED' 2.88MB, LS120 and SuperDisk were all very rarely used in reality.

You could use Stacker to get a bit more :-).

My first experience seeing an 8" floppy was a professor holding one up so I assumed it was a novelty educational oversized thing. They were ancient back then and it's been awhile since I was in school.

Even before then, 5.25" was popular among personal computer makers, such as Apple, Radio Shack, Commodore, Atari, and Osborne. (Though the TRS-80 Model II used 8".)

Wow, never knew that! Today I learned.

From the subhead of the article:

> The Defense Department has transitioned away from a 1970s-era nuclear command and control system that relied on eight-inch floppy disks.

It obviously shouldn't require floppy disks to run. Those disks are unreliable.

If it only requires floppy disks for system updates or something, that's arguably acceptable for a commercial aircraft in the maintenance hangar but not for a nuclear weapons system.

Well there goes the most solid security measure to ever exist.

No one's gonna hack floppy disks.

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21347890

How long until they are rejected as save icons?

They finally upgraded to 5¼-inch floppy disks?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com