41–43 of 43 posts
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.
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.
“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.
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.