Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks | Hacker News Reader

Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks

nytimes.com

94 pointsdwynings90 comments

Great. Now only left for Azure to remove the A: drive from their VMs.

I work in na multicloud SaaS, on Azure. Colleagues tease me. They actually bought me a blue floppy disk labeled "Azure - important!". I even have a Jira ticket somewhere, assigned to me "Uninstall floppy drive".

I haven't seen A: on Azure VMs until pretty recently, when I let "az vm create" pick the SKU for me. does it vary based on SKU? do some of the SKUs use it? weird..

Good question. D1_v2, D2_v2 and NV6 have them, because I use them day-to-day. I have some E4, I'll have to check.

F-16s still use PCMCIA cards to load targeting data. They have enough space, they work fine, they're not too big, and they're not too small. You really don't want to be trying to insert an SD card while wearing gloves in cold weather.

I always liked PCMCIA slots -- you could add a whole bunch of different features to your machine in a fairly compact format. It's sad that laptops ditched them so long ago

I had that Apple powerbook G3 that had two hot swap bays for batteries/hard drives/media players AND a PCMCIA slot. Oh, and built-in ethernet. I remember adding Firewire support via PCMCIA. Good times.

I had an Orinico Gold WiFi card in my PCMCIA expansion pack for a Compaq Ipaq PDA back in the early 2000s. It was awesome!

I have a fond memory of my older brother buying an Orinoco card and putting it in his laptop and then us cruising around town wardriving back in the day

What does wardriving mean?

Wardriving was driving around town with a laptop scanning for WiFi access points without any encryption. Most wardrivers would have a GPS card and software that’d build a map up as you drive of all SSIDs and locations, which could be uploaded and contributed to by others.

This was back before ubiquitous open WiFi and encryption.

Slight amendment.

The heyday of wardriving (IMHO) was before the industry got its shit together with WPA.

Because before WPA, there was WEP. Which it turns out had multiple vulnerabilities, given enough traffic.

https://www.dummies.com/programming/networking/understanding...

Ergo, there was a period from ~1999-2004 whereby one could aim a Pringles cantenna at a neighbor's AP and crack their WEP password in order-of-an-evening (depending on how much traffic they were generating).

Not that I ever did such a thing, mind you.

Used it for that too! https://i.imgur.com/omNpSPr.jpg

They’re great cards and easy to write drivers for. I still use one in one of my thinkpads for wireless because it used to be the only card supported by 9front and plan 9 back in the day.

As far as I know the only type still in common use is CableCard, which I believe your cable company is legally obliged to support, and enables things like Tivo and HDHomeRun to work.

I still pay Spectrum $2.50 a month for a CableCARD in my ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner that powers my HTPC setup running Windows 8 Media Center

They just went smaller - Thunderbolt implements PCIe [1] under the hood. You can connect graphics cards over TB, for example.

[1] It actually implements three protocols that it can switch between based on endpoint negotiation - PCIe, DisplayPort, and in its latest version USB 3.1.

Only problem with Thunderbolt is that it's not an open standard.

It is now! Intel released the rights to USB-IF earlier this year, and it will be the basis of USB4: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/03/thunderbolt-3-become...

Honestly, I have always enjoyed just saying the acronym “PCMCIA”. It has a nice rhythm: “PCM.... CIA”

But the problem was that People Couldn't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms.

They could have just changed the form factor of the connector and card and used the regular SD(XC) protocol and wiring rather than going back to an old technology for the whole thing.

Going back? The F-16 is 45 years old.

Why create a custom form factor when off the shelf tech will do fine?

Spotted the guy that's into over engineering.

Same thing with the MH series of helicopters the Army uses.

> All of this may leave the modern reader wondering: What is a floppy disk?

Oh my! I feel sooo old now!

> replacement of the aging SACCS floppy drives with a highly secure solid-state digital storage solution

I thought SSDs are not very reliable, no? Especially for the crucial infras. It looks like complexity and maintenance has also increased exponentially.

Anecdotally, I'd estimate 10% of floppy disks I purchased were DOA, and about 0% for SSDs. Would be curious for more rigorous data

Yep. Floppies were not reliable at all, but cheap, disposable, and very convenient (during those times). My point about SSDs was not about SSD vs floppy, but about SSD vs some other modern tech. e.g. super secure proprietary tape storage.

Tape? More reliable than SSD? I thought you said you were old?

Jokes aside, the best reliability is probably more redundancy.

Take a few SSDs, write the same data over and over (multiple times on each). If more than 50% agree, then its legit.

You can increase the reliability by arbitrarily increasing the redundancy in this case.

>Take a few SSDs, write the same data over and over (multiple times on each). If more than 50% agree, then its legit

They may all fail at the same or very similar time if you write the same data to them

Tape is still used for archival purposes, as it has very long shelf life (i.e. longevity when not under heavy usage) and low cost per byte of storage (fancy electronics go into the R/W machine and the library hardware, not the tapes). AWS Glacier (https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/) was built to replace on-premise tape libraries, and while no one knows exactly what storage medium they use, a tape library is one of the possibilities given the pricing model (cheap storage, expensive retrieval) and retrieval delays (on the order of hours, unless you're willing to pay extra for on the order of minutes). Other possibilities I've heard thrown around include I/O-poor NAS boxes, and a tape-like mechanical library of optical disks.

I recall reading somewhere (pretty sure it was actually here) that Glacier used some sort of custom low-RPM spinning rust that could be spun down when not in use and otherwise took very little power.

No one really knows - there have been leaks saying multiple contradictory things over the years, which leads me to believe they're experimenting with a variety of storage technologies.

More anecdata, but my experience was that as floppies became less common (around 2000-2005?) the quality control got way worse if you just got a random box of them from Office Max or wherever.

that's interesting, i was purchasing in early 2000's so that lines up

Up to around 1995 I had about 0 defects. Later the quality decreased until around 10-20% defects.

That was my experience. I used (and not gently) hundreds of 5.25" floppies in the mid to late 1980s and had very few problems. Wore out drives, but the disks lasted forever. At first 3.25" disks were very good as well; it was normal to install a commercial software product that was distributed on a half dozen or more 3.25" disks that would all work perfectly year after year. Later quality dropped off and floppy media became rather unreliable.

I can only imagine how reliable a mil spec 8" drive with mil spec media must be.

The 5.25" disks were much more reliable than the 3.5". I had plenty of bad 3.5" after I used it a lot, but almost no bad 5.25" disk. Not sure if it was related to the areal density, rotational speed, head distance - I've seen scratched 3.5" disks quite often.

I still have a 8" disk in my desk's drawer, but I have no reader to check it. It is probably still good more than 25 years after the last time it was written (I have it since ~ 1992).

I was about to make this comment with the exact same year.

In 1994, the low-end brands went bad. By 1995, all brands were bad. A few years later, the drives started to be bad.

That was the late 90s and early 2000s when the manufacturing was off-shored and hired out.

I rehabbed my dads old IBM XT a few years ago, 10/10 new in box 5.25” floppy disks were in perfect condition.

Yup all my Apple ][ floppies are still readable. I formatted them between 1985-1990.

Most of the CDROMs I burned in the 2000s are bad, no matter how much I spent on the blanks.

> Oh my! I feel sooo old now!

I've handled 5.25" floppies on old computers (running DOS and old, old, ~~Mac~~ Apple operating systems), but 8" floppies specifically are an extra level of ancient and hard-to-find.

Macs have been using 3.5" floppies from the word go. Were you using after market drives? Early prototype Macs?

You're right, it was more Apple II (or similar) than Mac. The brands have blurred in my mind with time!

My high school computer lab (barely/rarely) ran off 8" floppies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly-1

The dozen or so computers were "networked" to a shared storage unit (Proteus?) that consisted of two 8" floppy drives. Not that we got our own disks or anything - they were more of a permanently mounted NAS/SAN. We'd probably average a couple of hours class time per year on them, so not very effective.

This was 5 years or so after I'd already used 5.25" floppies on a TRS-80, and about the same time 3.5" ones were used on early Macs and Amigas.

My school computer room had a single old machine which took 8" floppies, entirely unused and gathering dust in a corner, when I started computer studies in the late 80s, and a room full of 5.25"-equipped BBC micros... By the time I left, the BBCs had largely been replaced by semi-IBM-compatible RM Nimbus PCs with 3.25" drives.

At home, on the other hand, I spent a while with an Amstrad PCW - running CP/M from 3" floppies!

One of the nice things about SSDs is that they can be designed to exacting specifications of reliability and longevity.

Huh, floppies have been gone that long? Back when I was doing my BSCS (1998-2002), we turned in our assignments in a folder containing a printed code listing and a 3.5" floppy disk - there were better ways to move small amounts of source code around even then, so I suspect it had something to do with some of the more eccentric CS professors insisting on using old machines (I saw old 68k UNIX boxen (including NextStations) in some offices).

I actually don't think I used floppies much anymore after college. Most of the new hires we get these days say they turned in coding assignments by pushing them to a git server.

The US Government had a big thing for ZIP drives for a while. Saw those in wide use when I entered the defense contracting world in the late 2000s.

> [...] The US Government had a big thing for ZIP drives for a while. Saw those in wide use when I entered the defense contracting world in the late 2000s.

I love this statement. Because to me Zip drives died around the year 2000-ish from a regular consumer usage perspective.

Government IT: Yesterday’s stuff, tomorrow.

"Solid state digital" is a fairly generic term, and the actual device may bear little resemblance to what you think of as an SSD.

For instance, it could be a ROM, or something more closely resembling a flashable bios, or who knows what else.

>What is a floppy disk?

It's a 3D print of the Save File icon.

Why don't they just call it a save disk then? Are they printing in rubber or something? /i

I wonder if even this joke is becoming dated. I don't think I've seen a floppy icon in quite a while.

I haven't had a CD/DVD drive on a computer in 5 years. I think I might have had a floppy drive in the mid 2000s, but it's been a long enough that I can't remember.

May I ask what software you use mostly?

I just checked couple of programs I have open on my computer right now and the floppy as save icon is very used still; tortoise svn client, adobe reader, excel, winscp, notepad++, eclipse, all more or less up to date and showing floppy icon.

Hell, if someone put me sitting in front of a program I never used before, and said do this and that and save it, and all I was only seeing was picture of usb stick, or ssd drive, or a cloud, without "Save" written anywhere, I am not sure how long I would be looking for the "save" command :)

This makes me realise that I go days without using anything besides Firefox, Emacs, Spotify, and terminal windows (with many programs running inside of course but they don't have icons).

I've managed to find it in calibre and inkscape, although not in audacity, gimp, firefox, emacs, or transmission.

> All of this may leave the modern reader wondering: What is a floppy disk?

Interesting, In my quarter century of ripe old age, I distinctly remembered floppy disks from my childhood. My family had a commodity of them for whatever reason, they're everywhere and the best game on the computer was the minesweeper.

I guess the news are addressed towards true 21st century born now.

But you, myself, and most people in here of that age are most likely kids of upper-middle-class parents who actually had computers, back when most office computers were still up to a $10k investment.

Floppy disks were around a lot back then, but that doesn't mean kids actually encountered them. I'm 28. My first computer experience was at the age of 6, but most people I knew as a kid didn't touch one until the age of 15. By then, floppies were already gone.

I don't think there's any age range that has a majority of people aware of what a floppy disk is. We have magnitudes more tech-aware people than we did back when floppies were a thing.

What? I am your age. I grew up working class and my parents had a crappy computer they bought at Sams Club with a floppy drive. The neighborhors had one too. I turned in my homework with floppies. Most students (working class) had one in the house, but a lot of the time the computer was rather ancient.

Interesting. I don't remember using floppies after 1999.

It’s about the same timeframe for me as well. I definitely used a floppy for BIOS updates and transferring Matlab files in 1999, but a laptop I bought in 2000 didn’t have a floppy drive.

My friends & I in grade school were trading files on floppy up into 2005

SSDs are a lot more reliable than floppy discs.

As to crucial infra - you should be using replication anyway, so individual drives failing is somewhat of a non-issue.

I just had a flashback to early consumer digital cameras that had floppy disk storage.

https://petapixel.com/2016/12/12/look-back-digital-cameras-u...

I remember when my uncle showed me his Sony mavica. You could just take pictures, take out the disk and put in it your computer and the files where there. Viewing your own pictures on a pc was almost magical, as until digital cameras became common digital pictures were just pretty rare (I only had some stock pictures that came with software). Funny thing I still prefer the "put card from camera in computer" method to transfer pictures with my DSLR

Different article source... but here's the discussion from the other thread from a week ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21287944

A silly floppy trick that can sometimes confuse people:

1. Hold a floppy disk up by the edges.

2. Stick your finger through the center hole, so that the side of your finger is resting on the edge of the hole.

3. Start moving your finger clockwise around the edge of the hole, which should cause the disk to rotate within the sleeve.

4. Watch the index hole in the sleeve. As your finger motion causes the disk to rotate in the sleeve, you should eventually see the index hole in the disk pass by the index hole in the sleeve.

5. From the motion of the index hole, you will see that the disk is rotating counterclockwise! But you are moving your finger clockwise--so what is going on?

There's some wiggle room in the floppy so when you move your finger around the hole like that it's pushing the disk to the edges of the casing. So to help see what's happening here, imagine the casing is 10x10in, the disk is 5x5in, and the hole in the casing is 3in circle. If you're moving your finger clockwise starting by pushing your finger up, the center of the disk is centered with the casing. Move your finger to the right and the disk rolls on the top edge for a bit (spinning counter-clockwise) before you start coming around the inner circle and the disk comes off the top edge and to the side edge.

As you are moving your finger clockwise, the disk is pressing against the edges causing it to roll counter-clockwise.

The article isn't specific on what the floppy disks have been replaced with other than "a highly secure solid-state digital storage solution". Would this meet milspecs for reliability and redundancy in an event where either the reader or storage medium are damaged, possibly to radioactive decay?

I'd been under the impression that magnetic storage was less sensitive to bit-flips or data degradation more than modern storage technologies like flash drives.

I guess you've never used floppies? They have _incredibly_ bad reliability. Google for 'floppy disk reliability' if you can't take my word.

Presumably you’d want to look for a comparison in the context of the state’s needs. Googling for floppy disk reliability won’t tell you much by itself.

What I had found showed less reliability over time because economics of scale reduced manufacturing costs and thus price of 3.5" and 5.25" ones, where some said that 8" disks were extremely reliable. My thoughts were that well-made disks could have a lifetime comparable to that of LTO storage.

8 1/2" drives are reliable (fast, too) if you're comparing to 9-inch tape.

They were reliable prior to 1994, reliable for good brands in 1994, and unreliable after 1994.

A few years later, the floppy drives became terrible too. Every computer was expected to have a floppy drive, but the drives were seldom used, so the quality was cut for price competition.

> “This replacement effort exponentially increased message storage capacity and operator response times for critical nuclear command and control message receipt and processing.”

Glad to know operator response times have exponentially increased!

It’s comforting to know that at least software will be up to date as we all go to hell after these things fire.

Hopefully they encoded history of our stupid existence into the flash drives or whatever they used this time.

Y U SO PESSIMISTIC???

it's actually not that bad! I mean nowadays, what's going on right now. Media has gotten better at emotional appeal but that's about it.

Nothing is gonna fire. And noones going to hell (trust me, I'm an engineer). Politics are complicated and always were, nothing new.

My point is, we (humanity) got it! Tech and scientific progress didn't slow down but accelerated.

Worry not!

Is the headline accurate? Was this the only remaining system in the LCCs that still used floppies?

It was the only system the general public knew of. It being the only system left is a bit of a question of how much you believe, it's not like people get tours of modern launch control centers to check.

One question: How exactly did you test it works?

My guess would be without an actual nuke installed. Make sure the machinery all does the right motions.

Can we block nytimes? they force you to sign in.

I wasn't forced to login. Not sure if there is an article limit or not.

There is a 5/month limit stored in your browser as a cookie and checked by some javascript. If you haven't read 5 articles yet in that browser, or you have scripts or cookies disabled, that'd be why.

FYI in Europe it's one (!) article. I installed uMatrix precisely for NYTimes.

probably not gonna happen, paywalled links are explicitly allowed in the hn guidelines.

Because you're in private mode? You can still read the text of the article, as it's briefly displayed before being obscured. While the full text is visible there is enough time to do an alt-A (select all) clt-C (copy) key sequence, then at your leisure paste into your favourite text editor and read.

Well it was nice knowing you guys

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