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US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

cnbc.com

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Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#71

Post by drzaiusapelord »

cm2187 wrote: post #13

It reminds me this story, which was told to me as a true story, but I wouldn't bet too much on that. A soviet bomber gets lost and finds itself over western germany. It has to land on a military airport, which pilots jovially invite the soviet pilots for a drink. While they are drinking, intelligence officers take pictures of the plane, and are laughing at antiquated soviet technology, using bulbs while the US was we…

There are EMP shielding techniques for solid state systems. The reality is the Soviets were very behind technologically in many areas compared to the west. A good example is the bulbous nature of their spacecraft. They simply didn't have the metalworking to make square cutouts and square windows that didn't eventually fail, so everything was round like a boat or a submarine design. Its fairly ahistoric to pretend this was all part of some master plan. It was just the best they could do and playing up the old technology as being magically superior is pretty silly.

The other story you hear is how the Soviets used pencils in space while NASA use spacepens. Pencils break off graphite which could get into controls and pressurized ink cartridges in spacepens are cheap and easy to manufacture. There's no downside to using a spacepen, but lots to using pencils.

Meanwhile, the few live confrontations between US fighters and Soviet made MiGs resulted in dead MiG pilots. Its clear that the higher tech and more innovative approach was superior and continues to be today. US missile defense systems keeping Russian and North Korean aggression from expanding for example.

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#72

Post by bhollan »

cm2187 wrote: post #68
bhollan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still sell them today. They're called Nuclear Event Detection (NED) chips. It detects a spike in voltage from the air and drops all power to everything, acting as an instantaneous power interrupt for everything you care about. I used to test them for Lockheed all the time on stuff that flies on stealth aircraft. There is a very specific sequence of events with very tight specs they have to pass, the whole thing…

Would dropping power help? I thought the way the nuclear blast damages electronic circuits was by inducting large electric currants which would burn the components. If that's the case it doesn't really change anything whether the circuit was active or not at the time of the blast.

You can quite easily shield all your components from outside pulses. However, if you're processing signals from the air (like in the case of Radar systems, the ones I worked on), your stuff could quite easily get fried. Like an amp could get overloaded, a processor could get fried, a line could get burned, all kinds of things could go wrong. But the best thing you can do is have everything off. If you're close enough to a nuke that stuff that's off gets fried, your electronics are probably pretty low on your list of priorities.

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#73

Post by Grishnakh »

Pengwin wrote: post #43
TeMPOraL wrote: post #23

Old storage media (floppies, CDs) have a big advantage over new ones (SD cards, USB sticks, hard drives) - they don't have firmware . Most people didn't notice how over the last decade or so we've moved from having a computer read out data directly from a removable medium to having two computers talking together over a low-level, high-privilege protocol. While there are many benefits to this evolution, it also opens…

My father worked for a very long time on traffic signal systems, and a lot of their old technology was a simple EEPROM chip which they wrote a program for the signals, burned to a chip that costed a pittance, and that was it. I remember him telling me when they changed to a new system based on (i think) PCMCIA interfaces and the complexity of deployment and cost were magnitudes greater for no real benefit. If its an…

>If its an embedded system and the cost and work of supporting it is less than the cost and deployment of a new system, whats the point in updating it?

The problem is support and maintenance. Things wear out eventually, and if you can't get the parts to fix them any more, then your whole system fails.

This really shouldn't be a problem with EEPROMs, however; I'm pretty sure you can still buy those, and the programmers for them too. But 8" floppy disks, and the drives to read them, are another matter.

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#74

Post by Grishnakh »

Scarblac wrote: post #70
throwanem wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are there producers of 8" floppy media anymore? It would appear so, and in the US, yet: http://www.athana.com/html/diskette.html#8

Cool, a web page linked in a serious discussion that has copyright 1997 on it. The page was created about half way between the heydey of 8" floppies (late 70s) and today.

What's really sad is I remember 1997 well; I was still in college at the time, and I laughed any time I saw 8" floppies because they were so antiquated. I remember laughing about them in 1991 even because I came across some in that year. I remember also watching WarGames somewhere around that time (high school) and laughing about the 8" floppies in that move. And now more time has passed since those times than there was between the heyday of the 8" floppies and when I laughed about them. I feel really old... but I also really question WTF is going on with our government that they're still using the things. Disk drives don't last forever.

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#75

Post by Grishnakh »

5ilv3r wrote: post #34

What's wrong with 8" floppy disks? They seem easy to manufacture (same as a VHS tape but cut differently), are pretty reliable if you keep them away from magnets (Which is common sense), and don't really have a shelf life problem until the plastic gets brittle. Hell, if they degrade, you can even retrieve the undamaged parts with no fuss. Who wins by moving to SD?

The problem is trusting such a critical function to ancient hardware that's bound to wear out at some point, and for which you can't buy a replacement. Disk drives don't last forever; they're fairly complex machines with moving parts.

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#77

Post by reality_czech »

draw_down wrote: post #18
Malic wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is something to be said about using proven technologies. But there is also something to be said about using still supported technologies. Really, are there producers of 8" floppy media anymore? Are we relying on "new-but-old" stock for occasional replacement needs for these systems? Sounds like that wrench that had to be FedEx'ed between silo bases for Minuteman maintenance: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-wr…

Yeah, we should really be using off-the-shelf components for our nuclear weaponry.

If the pointy haired bosses ever decide to upgrade our "nuculur" systems from DOS to the "more modern" Windows 95, we're all done for.

All the folks who are whining about how we should be using USB sticks should Google "stuxnet."

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#78

Post by gravypod »

Grishnakh wrote: post #74
Scarblac wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, a web page linked in a serious discussion that has copyright 1997 on it. The page was created about half way between the heydey of 8" floppies (late 70s) and today.

What's really sad is I remember 1997 well; I was still in college at the time, and I laughed any time I saw 8" floppies because they were so antiquated. I remember laughing about them in 1991 even because I came across some in that year. I remember also watching WarGames somewhere around that time (high school) and laughing about the 8" floppies in that move. And now more time has passed since those times than there…

Would it be bad to mention I was born in 1997? February to be more specific.

That site and I are about the same age.

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#79

Post by DrScump »

5ilv3r wrote: post #34

What's wrong with 8" floppy disks? They seem easy to manufacture (same as a VHS tape but cut differently), are pretty reliable if you keep them away from magnets (Which is common sense), and don't really have a shelf life problem until the plastic gets brittle. Hell, if they degrade, you can even retrieve the undamaged parts with no fuss. Who wins by moving to SD?

Meanwhile, lots of present-day sites use a diskette icon to represent a "save" function. A diskette? Seriously?

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#80

Post by JupiterMoon »

DrScump wrote: post #79
5ilv3r wrote: post #34

What's wrong with 8" floppy disks? They seem easy to manufacture (same as a VHS tape but cut differently), are pretty reliable if you keep them away from magnets (Which is common sense), and don't really have a shelf life problem until the plastic gets brittle. Hell, if they degrade, you can even retrieve the undamaged parts with no fuss. Who wins by moving to SD?

Meanwhile, lots of present-day sites use a diskette icon to represent a "save" function. A diskette ? Seriously?

Language and symbols evolve. When that icon was first used it was a disk. Now it means save. Users know what it means.
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