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Comment by otis_inf | Hacker News Reader

One word that I don't associate with floppies is 'reliable'. I don't know how many times I had bad sectors on my floppies back in the day. There's no protection against magnetic fields, the material on the plastic disk isn't always OK (hence the 'single sided' 3.5" floppies you could buy and which you could transform into double-sided floppies by punching a hole in the corner ;))

So it was surprising to me that floppies were seen as reliable in the article and e.g. usb sticks aren't (they're not mentioned as an alternative at all, which I find a little odd)

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I think this whole reliability talk was about the devices that use the floppy drives not the disk themselves. To get rid of floppy drives some machines would need to be replaced or retrofitted with newer models, and this is the source of unreliability.

I don't think so:

> “The floppy disks and associated technology are tried and true,” I was told. “As you can imagine, we want to ensure the utmost in reliability and efficacy when operating such a critical weapon system. Therefore, if a system is ‘old,’ but still reliable, we are inclined to use it.”

That's a quote, not a direct claim by the article, but the article presents it as factual and doesn't follow it up with anything but confirmation.

"if a __system__ is 'old'" is the key phrase here.

Yes, but at the beginning the speaker explicitly calls out floppy disks as "tried and true" when they definitely are not. Tried, yes, but not true.

I can buy the argument that the systems as a whole are trustworthy even if the floppy disks they use kind of suck. But this quote goes beyond that.

I wanted to learn Perl but lacked an internet connection. The only way was downloading at the library and saving onto floopy disks. It was >12mb windows installer meaning I had to split it across 10+ disks. It took 3 attempts to get a full set of disks without ant errors.

As long as USB sticks can masquerade as keyboards, having a USB port is not really desirable in a secure environment. And the need for high reliability often goes together with a need for high security.

Good point, didn't think of that.

USB sticks took down nuclear reactors in Iran ;)

> There's no protection against magnetic fields

I agree that floppies were all but reliable in practice. But I suspect sensitivity to magnetic fields was largely a myth. I did some experiments back in the day with some permanent magnets and 3.5" disks. As I remember it was pretty hard to make the disk unreadable with those. Granted they were probably much weaker than what is available today (neodymium must have been terribly exotic back then). I was much less afraid after that that some carelessly positioned magnet will wipe out my floppy library.

I agree. I tried to erase 3.5" and 5.25" floppies with refrigerator magnets as a kid, and they did nothing.

Magnetism is an inverse-cube law, and the write head is really close to the disk. Even if you hold your magnet to the floppy casing, you have a hard fight against the inverse cube.

I remember having corrupted disks that I had kept too close to the speakers and CRT, but I can't say whether the corruption was actually caused by the magnetic fields or not.

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