REAL LIFE NEWS: NUCLEAR WEAPONS THAT RUN OFF FLOPPY DISKS
by Hazed
A storage medium from the distant past turns out to be keeping the records for the most dangerous weapon ever invented – because amongst the ancient technology running the US nuclear arsenal are 8-inch floppy disks.
Cue outrage, following a report on 60 Minutes recently. You can watch the program at the source link below.
Youngsters probably don’t even know what floppy disks are. They are what we used to store computer data on before flash drives and USB sticks became cheap and ubiquitous. Even before CDs (remember those?). Consumer computers came with disk drives, taking either five and a quarter inch floppy disks, or the smaller three and a half inchers which came in a hard case so were no longer as floppy.
Commercial computers used larger disks: eight inch disks, some of which would hold a whole megabyte of data. Don’t laugh, at the time that seemed like an enormous amount.
Eight inch disks pre-date five and a quarter inch disks. The drives were expensive and really only affordable for commercial companies. Five and a quarter inch disks came in about the same time as the first personal computers, and some of them (eg the Commodore 64 disk drive) were slower than the cassette tape drive at reading files.
However, they were still an improvement on tape, because to get to the file you wanted you could just move the head to the correct place on the disk and start reading. If you were using a tape drive, you had to go back to the start and read in the tape from the start until you found the file you wanted. Writing a file on tape was even worse – if you wanted to write something into the middle of a file, you had to read the whole file into memory, change the bit you wanted altered, and then write the whole file back out again at the end of the tape, if there was room, or onto a new tape if there wasn’t room on the old tape! [Thanks to Alan for this technical explanation.]
Floppy disks don’t degrade as badly as other storage media such as film or micro-fiche, so there’s no real danger of losing the info on the nuclear disks, so long as they are handled carefully. The problem is maintaining hardware that can read the data. At some point, it would probably be a good idea to copy everything off those ancient disks and transfer it to something more up-to-date, but that will cost money and I can’t imagine the US government is going to approve that budget in these times of austerity and cutbacks.
So for now, anyone who wants to read the manual is going to have to stick with the ancient technology.
[Thanks to Jarin for pointing this story out to me.]
Source: http://www.geek.com/chips/americas-nuclear-arsenal-still-runs-off-of-8-inch-floppy-discs-1592596/
