Military has phased out the use of floppy disks to coordinate nuclear launches

Washington Times ^ | 18 October 2019 | Bailey Vogt

[pfflier]

The sarcasm about the old system is largely unwarranted. The SACCS was used uniformly with all SAC assets, airplanes and missiles. It worked.

I did maintenance on the Minuteman III for 8 years in the 70's and 80's and it was the same system. It was solid and SIMPLE. It was not tied to the internet in any way, couldn't be hacked, was survivable in an EMP environment and had good checks and balances with human interfaces. The only real reason to leave it behind is that it is impossible to get 5 1/4 in disks anymore.

[Openurmind]

Lol, I was curious about that too! Another fantastic use of taxpayer’s money... It never ends...

[G Larry]

In 2006 the Mk 12 R/S test set that I used in 1972 was still in use at VAFB.

[Right Wing Assault]

Yeah, Baby! I have a few of those floating around. Kids freak out when I show them.

[Future Snake Eater]

Sounds like some millennial convinced them to use the Internet (along with GPS) for our national defense.

We've been using the Internet (and especially GPS) for our national defense for a long time now.

[mowowie]

Same here i was a field service IT guy back in the late 90’s early 2000’s.
Been to MANY corporations here in MA and by far the most backwards old tech places were government offices i visited.
IRS, Secret Service, FBI, Social security, local police, jails, prisons, etc.
OLD filthy crappy machines...unbelievable.
You see all this high tech stuff on all these cop shows?
Don’t believe it.

[Future Snake Eater]

Oh my god, Is this real? This totally destroys my confidence in high tech security keeping us safe. Anyone remember how little it took for these floppies to fail? This is something I would have kept a secret, little Kim is probably more up to date than this. lol

I work in nuclear command and control these days. Remember how long we've had these systems and understand how low their priority has been for modernization for both "if it works, then why change it?" and "security through obscurity" reasons.

[bitt]

omg, I’ll donate my old winXPs if they need them..

[stylin19a]

worked great until the click of death ?

[HamiltonJay]

They have replaced the 8” floppies with 5.25” floppies

[GingisK]

Both were initially deployed for military use long before the general public could use them.

[Openurmind]

My concern was reaction times. Kind of like the difference of latency between a heliograph and smoke signals. Historically the difference was the determining factor in conflicts.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Now that I think it about it, they’re probably more reliable than a new thumb drive or SD card...LOL.

EMP proof, ya?

[Fresh Wind]

Nope. The Click of Death was the so-called zip drives.

Those 20mb cartridges were rugged and trouble free.

[Future Snake Eater]

That more has to do with the decision-making and force direction functions. Once the decision is made, there’s time.

It’s pretty much all over for us at that point anyway.

[McGruff]

You can’t hack something that doesn’t have an IP address.

He's got a point there.

[stylin19a]

thanks...I had the zip drive :(

[CodeToad]

“Another mystery is WHERE would you be buying these in 2017?”

Defense contracts do it, but probably at a significant cost. DoD pays companies not to deprecate things. For one NORAD system, we paid HP to keep 32k magnetic core memory parts for us, and those things cost about $65k a piece well into the 1990’s.

[CodeToad]

“along with GPS”

Actually, GPS, called Navstar, was created for national defense and was in use long before civilians got to use it.

[Trump Girl Kit Cat]

OMG they were still using floppy discs, REALLY, LOL, LOL, LOL,