They finally upgraded to 5¼-inch floppy disks?
Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks (2019)
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Re: Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks (2019)
#12“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.
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.
Re: Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks (2019)
#13What'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.
Re: Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks (2019)
#14What'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.
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?
Re: Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks (2019)
#15Re: Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks (2019)
#16What'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.
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.
Re: Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks (2019)
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks (2019)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks (2019)
#19How long until they are rejected as save icons?
Re: Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks (2019)
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.