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26th May 2016, 9:55 am | #1 |
Heptode
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Location: LEEDS.......North of the River Aire.
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US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
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26th May 2016, 10:27 am | #2 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Surrey, UK.
Posts: 4,385
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
Perhaps there's merit in something as serious as this being immune from the rogue USB stick
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26th May 2016, 11:03 am | #3 |
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
This is an extreme example, but it's common for ancient IT to continue to be used by the military. Quite apart from the usual convoluted and protracted procurement process involved in any replacement, both the hardware and software tends to be highly modified and nonstandard. I once did some minor network planning consultancy for the UK Air Defence Ground Environment so saw a bit of this from the inside.
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26th May 2016, 12:53 pm | #4 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Lynton, N. Devon, UK.
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
The report does mention the cost of maintenance being 3 times more than the cost o investment in new technology, but doesn't highlight the risks in replacement, so it is a bit one sided. Well-proven technology is generally used in high-risk situations, rather than new, leading-edge stuff which hasn't yet clocked up a decade of experience in consumer and industrial applications.
At the foot of the page, it's interesting they ask for 'What last-century technology do you still use?' rather than last-millenium... an opportunity missed for a bit more of a dramatic contrast... Or maybe they wanted to exclude anything pre-1901! |
26th May 2016, 1:00 pm | #5 |
Moderator
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
Much consumer technology never will clock up a decade of experience.
What last century stuff (or even earlier) do I use regularly? Mathematics, Calculus, Transforms, Chaos Physical laws Quantum mechanical effects Farmed food to keep me going (and brewing!) Solder and soldering iron An infernal combustion engine to fetch stuff The wheel The internet Printed books Von Neumann-based architecture ... ... What have the Romans ever done for us? David
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26th May 2016, 1:02 pm | #6 |
Heptode
Join Date: Feb 2013
Location: Yarm, North Yorkshire, UK.
Posts: 535
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
Weapons control on British type 23 warships is still run under a mish mash of Windows 3.1 and XP. The newer type 42s run on Linux-based systems.
Colin PS - no state secret, was heard on a recent TV series about the Navy. |
26th May 2016, 1:11 pm | #7 |
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
Sometimes equipment just soldiers on through inertia, even though the economics of using it have become insane. This happens in the private sector too. In the mid 90s I installed a Siemens 3964R protocol handler in a United Biscuits factory. One of the lines was still being run by a late 70s rack mount PDP-11 complete with original RL01 disk packs. This was all still on contract maintenance. A modern micro-PDP running exactly the same software would have slotted straight into the same rack and paid for itself in a year in reduced maintenance alone. Nobody was bothered about it because it worked (most of the time) and the finance was somebody else's responsibility.
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26th May 2016, 1:21 pm | #8 |
Nonode
Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: Cambridge, Cambs. UK.
Posts: 2,196
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
It's not the floppy disks that concern me, it's whether there's still anyone around who understands the software well enough to keep it maintained.
Martin
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26th May 2016, 2:38 pm | #9 |
Octode
Join Date: Nov 2013
Location: Penrith, Cumbria, UK
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
Doesn't windows still run on a version of MsDOS shell still? I have no actual technical knowledge of this as its black magic to an old fart like me but I was told by someone that under the fancy graphics of windows beats a heart of good old fashioned DOS. Can anyone confirm or refute that?
Andy |
26th May 2016, 2:58 pm | #10 |
Nonode
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Warsaw, Poland and Cambridge, UK
Posts: 2,669
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
That was true up to Windows ME (so 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, ME). The Windows NT series (NT 3.x, 4.x, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 and 10) are not built on top of MSDOS. To summarise: no version of Windows released in the last 16 years has MSDOS underneath it, and versions of Windows not involving MSDOS have been available for 23 years (Windows NT was launched in 1993).
Chris
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26th May 2016, 4:18 pm | #11 |
Tetrode
Join Date: Nov 2015
Location: Berkshire, UK.
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
as said before i work in the commercial world of aircraft avionics the one of the big players in avionics
with equipment on all the big aircraft manufacture and we still use floppy's for testing on some of the older equipment the military are even slower than the aircraft world to change technologies so not surprised at all |
26th May 2016, 4:47 pm | #12 | |
Dekatron
Join Date: Aug 2003
Location: near Reading (and sometimes Torquay)
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
I suspect the systems involved are more like embedded systems that a simple PC. Changing the CPU is easy - getting the interfaces to work a total nightmare (probably easier to design new).
The article said: "You would need more than 130,000 8-inch floppy disks to store 32GB of memory - the size of an average memory stick" But omitted to mention that in spite of that, a typical memory stick will probably only contain a handful of useful things, much the same number as the floppy would have done. Curious, that. Quote:
Incoming missile detected. Impact in 10 seconds. 5 seconds. 4 seconds. Windows has found some unused icons on your desktop. Would you like to move them to the recycle bin? |
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26th May 2016, 5:05 pm | #13 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Jun 2015
Location: Biggin Hill, London, UK.
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
What pre-2000 technology do I use regularly? Oh $deity...
Positional number notation, arithmetic, algebra, calculus, complex numbers, trigonometry Boolean algebra and related logic Reverse Polish Notation Electromagnetism theory Levers, pulleys, wheels (and axles), gearing, chain and belt drives, screws, inclined planes, wedges. Internal combustion engines (both spark ignition and compression ignition (or at least the latter are used for me on public transport)) Electromagnetic generators and motors Electric bells, both trembler and AC Electrical relays Resistors, capacitors, inductors, and the theory that goes with them. Thermionic valves and CRTs Junction diodes and transistors, JFETs and MOSFETs Bipolar and MOS integrated circuits LEDs LCD displays Laser diodes Carbon, crystal, moving coil and electret microphones Moving coil and balanced armature speakers and earphones Incandescent and gas discharge lighting Electric heating elements Microcoded control systems Magnetic recording on tape and disk (audio and data in the former case) Binary character codes Paper tape (yes, I do use this regularly) And a heck of a lot more On the other hand I can't think of _anything_ produced in the last 30 years that has significantly improved my life! |
26th May 2016, 5:18 pm | #14 | |
Retired Dormant Member
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Shropshire, UK.
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
Quote:
The report also highlighted the fact that the military software is written in 'outdated' machine code. How do they think 'modern' high-level languages are compiled? |
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26th May 2016, 5:44 pm | #15 |
Moderator
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: Oxford, UK
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
A lot of old military stuff is coded in assembler, originally for performance reasons. This does make it much more difficult to port the software to a different architecture.
Some of the really old stuff is coded in actual machine code - lots of hex numbers. You need some Real Programmers to sort that out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_P...27t_Use_Pascal |
26th May 2016, 6:41 pm | #16 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Staffordshire Moorlands, UK.
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
When I heard this on the way to work, I just thought, mmm look how far the consumer has got used to built-in obsolescence where stuff is obsolete after 3 years. I doubt the military would tolerate that sort of thing, which is perhaps why it's still in use. If it aint broke etc
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26th May 2016, 6:45 pm | #17 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Wiltshire, UK.
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
And a lot of it runs on custom hardware too; the COTS [Commercial Off The Shelf] approach to military procurement has yet to become truly embedded, and even when it does there's always the cry of "we're different - we need customisation!" from the various branches of the services. So you often find that by the time a project goes-live it's already technologically-obsolete but by then there has been so much spent on getting it working that 'the powers that be' force it to be used to recover the sunk-costs and avoid too many "questions in the House".
[Sideline: a friend of mine in the 'states is ex-NASA and US DoD: over the last 3 decades he's been quietly getting the manufacturing/test documentation on obsolete semiconductors from the early transistor- and chip-makers - and the IP rights. If you have a requirement for an obscure 1959-vintage Delco or Honeywell RF-power transistor or a Fairchild 3.3V-logic-gate he can arrange for one to be manufactured for you at one of his partner fab-lab sites. Think $10K for the setup and a similar cost for the QA/testing. That gets you one transistor. There are people prepared to pay.] |
26th May 2016, 7:03 pm | #18 | |
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
Quote:
David
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Can't afford the volcanic island yet, but the plans for my monorail and the goons' uniforms are done |
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26th May 2016, 8:08 pm | #19 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Brentwood, Essex, UK.
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Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks
Possibly the older stuff is more resistant to damage by EMP (Electromagentic pulse: the very strong electromagnetic fields that are produced during atomic bomb explosions). The semiconductor geometries would have been much larger and possibly more resistant to interference. Circa 1980 I remember reading a report on one of the International Solid-State Circuits Conferences that appeared in the now-defunct US journal "Electronics" which mentioned that the size of the then-state of the art dynamic-RAM memory cells was so small that the stray charges released when a cosmic ray passes through Silicon were sufficient to flip the state of a cell. I seem to remember reading that the electronics used in Space missions has to be radiation-hardened to ensure that it will work reliably when solar flares occur.
Re last century stuff, I still have a Gateway 2000 PC running Windows 98 and MS Office 97. The PC came bundled with Kodak (Wang) Imaging, a very versatile program that I think is still available to buy, but is expensive. I use it with a late 1990's Epson scanner that has a negative attachment which can handle 120 roll film and sheet film negatives up to 4" x 5": scanners with this sort of functionality are rare and expensive these days. |
27th May 2016, 12:18 am | #20 |
Heptode
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Location: LEEDS.......North of the River Aire.
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The long legacy of the floppy disk
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