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Old 26th May 2016, 9:55 am   #1
brunel
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Default US nuclear force still uses floppy disks

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36385839
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Old 26th May 2016, 10:27 am   #2
turretslug
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Default 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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Old 26th May 2016, 11:03 am   #3
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Default 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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Old 26th May 2016, 12:53 pm   #4
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Default 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!
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Old 26th May 2016, 1:00 pm   #5
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Default 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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Old 26th May 2016, 1:02 pm   #6
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Default 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.
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Old 26th May 2016, 1:11 pm   #7
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Default 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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Old 26th May 2016, 1:21 pm   #8
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Default 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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Old 26th May 2016, 2:38 pm   #9
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Default 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
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Old 26th May 2016, 2:58 pm   #10
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Default 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).

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Old 26th May 2016, 4:18 pm   #11
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Default 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
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Old 26th May 2016, 4:47 pm   #12
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Default 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:
Weapons control on British type 23 warships is still run under a mish mash of Windows 3.1 and XP.
Really scarey...
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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Old 26th May 2016, 5:05 pm   #13
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Default 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!
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Old 26th May 2016, 5:18 pm   #14
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Default Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks

Quote:
Originally Posted by GMB View Post
Really scarey...
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?
Knowing Windows time estimation, it's more likely to be "10 seconds...2 hours..5 minutes...BANG!

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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Old 26th May 2016, 5:44 pm   #15
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Default 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
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Old 26th May 2016, 6:41 pm   #16
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Default 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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Old 26th May 2016, 6:45 pm   #17
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Default 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.]
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Old 26th May 2016, 7:03 pm   #18
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Default Re: US nuclear force still uses floppy disks

Quote:
Originally Posted by paulsherwin View Post
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
Oddly enough, I find this easier. The codes are logical as are the structures and the hardware it operates. What drives me loopy is fighting all the high level stuff like which menu someone chose to put which settings into.

David
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Old 26th May 2016, 8:08 pm   #19
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Default 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.
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Old 27th May 2016, 12:18 am   #20
brunel
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Default The long legacy of the floppy disk

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36389711
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