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The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid of its floppy disks

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Re: The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid of its floppy disks

#121

Post by HNLurker3 »

We need to fire whoever decided to make this decision, and then fire whoever decided to hire that person, and then reevaluate the entire existence of the agency that managed this entire process. Nuclear weapons are not a joke. These are the kinds of things that actually threaten our immediate existence. This whole thing makes me seriously sad, anxious, and scared. I don't know what else to say.

From what I understand, military personnel generally "operate" equipment and technologies that are built and designed by private industry. I can only imagine the idiotic buzz-word sales pitch that some whiz-kid fast-talking slime-ball in a suit from a fancy looking tech company made to some meat-head, decorated military general with no understanding of what a digital threat model is and barley knows how to check his email on a windows 7 machine on IE, all for quick federal contract. I hate it.

Re: The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid of its floppy disks

#122

Post by kelnos »

overcast wrote: post #87
PietdeVries wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the downside: you will only have a few technicians that really understand how things work, hiring new ones is next to impossible as teenagers have never seen neither the hardware nor the software that is running on it. It scales terrible to new locations. I recall a few years ago NASA was looking for 286-processors for the Space Shuttle. I cannot imagine your spacecraft is getting safer because of outdated hardwa…

Since human knowledge isn't passed down through genetics, people generally don't know about something, until they have worked with it. That's what education is for, whether it's on their own or formally in a class room. I assume anyone being groomed for these positions, learns it like any other trade.

Yes, but you'd rather not have to train at all for these positions, and have a robust hiring pool of people who already have training because that training is applicable to a wide range of jobs.

You're also less likely to be able to find people willing to train in something they know is obsolete and will have no utility outside the job at hand, which means you have to spend more money to find and train these people.

I guess all this is less of a problem in the military, where you do as you're told, but still.

Re: The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid of its floppy disks

#123

Post by kelnos »

jki275 wrote: post #82
PietdeVries wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the downside: you will only have a few technicians that really understand how things work, hiring new ones is next to impossible as teenagers have never seen neither the hardware nor the software that is running on it. It scales terrible to new locations. I recall a few years ago NASA was looking for 286-processors for the Space Shuttle. I cannot imagine your spacecraft is getting safer because of outdated hardwa…

We teach them every detail of everything they need to know in their technical school when they come into the military. Old equipment is actually interesting to work on -- difficult, but interesting. It's also very valuable for understanding modern hardware at a deep level that isn't often taught anymore. How many people do you know who have actually replaced and aligned the heads on a UYH-3 or run end to end tests on…

> How many people do you know who have actually replaced and aligned the heads on a UYH-3 or run end to end tests on serial data channels that traverse thousands of feet and multiple switchboards from a UYK-43?

I think that's interesting and valuable on its own from an academic/research/nostalgia perspective, but not when we're talking about maintaining systems critical to the functioning of a nuclear weapons arsenal.

Re: The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid of its floppy disks

#124

Post by kelnos »

anoncake wrote: post #94
PietdeVries wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the downside: you will only have a few technicians that really understand how things work, hiring new ones is next to impossible as teenagers have never seen neither the hardware nor the software that is running on it. It scales terrible to new locations. I recall a few years ago NASA was looking for 286-processors for the Space Shuttle. I cannot imagine your spacecraft is getting safer because of outdated hardwa…

Hiring people experienced with floppies isn't harder than hiring people experienced with nuclear weapons.

The difficulty in finding people with experience with nuclear weapons is inherent to the task.

The difficulty in finding people experienced with floppies is a choice made, a burden taken on due to a lack of willingness to use more-current technology.

Not saying bleeding-edge whiz-bang tech is a great idea for nuclear weapons control and comms systems, but when it's hard to source parts, and hiring new people usually requires extensive training on technology they've never seen before and will never see again, that's a problem.

Re: The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid of its floppy disks

#125

Post by kelnos »

fragmede wrote: post #117
PietdeVries wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the downside: you will only have a few technicians that really understand how things work, hiring new ones is next to impossible as teenagers have never seen neither the hardware nor the software that is running on it. It scales terrible to new locations. I recall a few years ago NASA was looking for 286-processors for the Space Shuttle. I cannot imagine your spacecraft is getting safer because of outdated hardwa…

> I cannot imagine your spacecraft is getting safer because of outdated hardware.() Given the possibility of hardware bugs; eg FOOF, Intel dev bug, outdated hardware is well tested hardware, and as such, is arguably safer than newer, less-well tested hardware.

I doubt there's a material difference in well-testedness in hardware from the 70s/80s vs hardware from, say, the early 00s. Certainly, don't incorporate brand new off-the-shelf commercial hardware designed in 2019 for such a task, but a 15-20 year lag should give you similar (if not better) reliability than a 30-40 year lag.

Re: The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid of its floppy disks

#126

Post by kelnos »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #80
bArray wrote: post #36

I know of several military systems that still use floppy disks, that comforts me for a few reason: * Their maintenance is well understood - every fault that is likely to happen has happened and has been recovered/repaired from. It's very unlikely there will be new surprised down the road. * Their degradation is well understood - it's been around long enough that parts have failed and have been repaired. * Isn't easil…

Absolutely. When you have a system that absolutely must not fail ever, you want it to be set up so that all the code involved--not just the application but the system it runs on--can be manually reviewed in a practical timeframe. If you're running on any modern OS, even a really good, stable one, that's millions of lines of code that you're just hoping don't have any weird, undiscovered edge case interactions with yo…

> If you're running on any modern OS, even a really good, stable one

I suspect here you're thinking about mainstream OSes, like Linux, one of the BSDs, etc.

But there are quite a few very small, well-tested (RT)OSes that are actively maintained and suitable for the "absolutely must not fail ever"[0] use case.

[0] Which is, of course, impossible, but you'll get a lot closer with a modern realtime OS written to purpose vs. a Linux-type deal.

Re: The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid of its floppy disks

#127

Post by jki275 »

kelnos wrote: post #123
jki275 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We teach them every detail of everything they need to know in their technical school when they come into the military. Old equipment is actually interesting to work on -- difficult, but interesting. It's also very valuable for understanding modern hardware at a deep level that isn't often taught anymore. How many people do you know who have actually replaced and aligned the heads on a UYH-3 or run end to end tests on…

> How many people do you know who have actually replaced and aligned the heads on a UYH-3 or run end to end tests on serial data channels that traverse thousands of feet and multiple switchboards from a UYK-43? I think that's interesting and valuable on its own from an academic/research/nostalgia perspective, but not when we're talking about maintaining systems critical to the functioning of a nuclear weapons arsenal…

Perhaps you're responding to a different discussion?

Read my comment in context and it will become quite clear.

Re: The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid of its floppy disks

#128

Post by einr »

magduf wrote: post #90
einr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Floppies are more reliable. I have plenty of C64 and Apple II floppies that work fine. 5,25" floppies (especially lower density variants like the ones you mention) are quite reliable indeed, but the most recently common 1.44 MB 3,5" floppy is terrible .

Nope, when I was using 1.44MB floppies, they were extremely reliable. However, after most people had moved on, when I did use more recently-manufactured ones, they were indeed terrible. My theory is that, when Zip disks and CD-Rs took over and people stopped using 1.44MB floppies, the manufacturing of them changed, and both the disks and the drives became much crappier than they used to be. The drive manufacturing mo…

Here's me replying to a 12 day old comment, but...

You are right that at some point they started making (much) worse quality 1.44MB floppies (and drives, probably, though I have had nothing but good experiences with mid-2000's floppy drives so far), but I still say they're much less reliable overall than most 5,25" formats.

I say this partly because I have a retro-computing hobby and when acquiring random floppies from various places my experience is that 360K floppies from the mid-80's almost invariably still work fine while DD and HD 3,5" floppies from the late 80's to mid 90's are about 50-75% unreadable garbage at this point. They just don't survive. I also remember having to throw out a lot of 3,5" floppies (name-brand, too; Sony, Verbatim, etc...) due to them becoming unreadable in just a few years in the late 90's.

I mean, it's not surprising. Each bit is simply much physically larger on a 5,25" floppy.

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