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

CNBC ^ | May 25, 2016 | Dan Mangan

[Heart-Rest]

Ozark Tom, it might be helpful just to take a quick look at the post I was responding to (post #26 by FReeper "Lazamataz"), in which he injected some humor into this discussion about the military's use of an outdated technology.

Then, in my response to him in my post #44, I tried to reply in kind to him with what I considered a humorous reply, showing him a way to "out-boast" the military by pointing out to them the areas where his 1-inch thumb drive is superior to the military's 8-inch floppies.

I guess my attempt at humor there was not a successful one (as shown by the two responses I got in reply to my post #44), but hopefully this post should clear up the question you asked about exactly what I was actually trying to claim in my post 44.

[SaveFerris]

I used my Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem to get to the university’s Vax-11. The 40-byte screen on the TV was not fun, though. When on campus, it was through the VT-101.

[IVAXMAN]

Much of those systems are probably old Digital VAX machines, possibly even PDP-11’s. Those are unhackable.

Well, I shouldn’t say that but VERY difficult because there are only a few select of us that even would know how to anymore.

---

I still make a living managing OpenVMS clusters (Itanium and Alphas) for a defense contractor. :)

[IVAXMAN]

Oh yea and Charon VAX (virtual OS on Intel hardware)

[Snowybear]

As long as someone changes the default FIELD password :)