German Navy still uses 8-inch floppy disks, working on emulating a replacement | Hacker News Reader

German Navy still uses 8-inch floppy disks, working on emulating a replacement

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In Germany, there is a saying:

„Das haben wir schon immer so gemacht. Das haben wir noch nie anders gemacht. Da könnte ja jeder kommen.“

In English, this roughly means:

"We have always done it this way. We have never done it differently. Anyone could come along and say that."

That explains a lot.

In most cases, this attitude is a competitive advantage. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton's_fence

I would have a hard time believing that. I work with a company that hired a lot of germans and they have the worst developer experience onboarding and general infra of any place i have worked.

When you outline why it’s bad and show how you would significantly speed up over 1000 engineers at the company with minimal work the answer is to leave it the same as is and “fix the issue” with some new process.

Needless to say once my shares vest this year im gone. It is really such a bad environment to work in.

I should note that the shares have been on a decade decline and i was brought in to fix these exact issues but no one at the company cares or puts in more than the bare minimum before clocking out for the day. I can’t fix an issue if people think it’s ok to spin up a new k8s instance for every single service, are ok spending a month after starting asking to be put in the right AD groups, and hand deploy almost everything.

That’s the norm in most places. People are comfortable with rote, repetitive work like manual deployments. If you automate that away, then the only things left are the unique, unpredictable, and uncomfortable parts. People don’t like that and will actively resist.

If you don’t have buy in and authority from senior management (CIO / CTO level), just give up.

If you thought you did but you’re still unable to enact change then you need to go back to senior leadership with everything translated into dollars. Not “better” or “faster”! Has to be “cheaper”!

In many cases it isn't. As long as technological innovation doesn't slow down this attitude will haunt a company/individual/nation.

Chesterton's fence is about knocking over established things without knowing why you are doing so. In engineering there are often good reasons to try new things, so you need some willingness to leave behind what you known.

Germany is still the third largest economy in the world, if it wants to remain there it needs to be able to adapt. German companies are definitely suffering from having large parts of the organization with people with that attitude, who don't want to learn new things and who don't even want to know if there might be a better way.

If you were trying to convince a german to abandon old/bad process, what would be a convincing / resonant counter-statement?

* not German by AFAIK its governance by appeals to authority.

There is a bit of dominance power play where you each try to establish that your rules have the most authority. Appeals to correctness are best done with an authoritative determination on said correctness. One way to avoid the power play confrontation is by letting them make the new rules which incorporate the changes you want.

It’s different to the Russian powerplay on who can get away with telling the biggest lies without being called out on it. The more outlandish and obvious the lie the stronger the signal of dominance.

You can not teach someone who doesn't want to learn. If you want an organization to change, you need people who are willing to demonstrate that change and show its superiority.

A big part of life is influencing others act in your interest even when it’s against their interests, we can’t replace people with better people and must work with the people we have. Sure you could try your luck elsewhere but that does not solve this problem. Appeals to superiority are not where I would start.

I think you totally misunderstood me. What I was advocating was that you give those willing to learn new things the ability to implement their ideas and by that their colleagues will see that there is a better way.

The most important thing is getting the others to want to learn.

The (only?) way I’ve seen work is demonstrating your way to be better by implementing it and surpassing whomever is still using the old process. They will then panic and scramble to implement the new process, often times actually quite well.

We‘re constantly playing catch-up but are actually quite alright at it (see EVs).

Very zmart, so how they have always been dealing with the internet, demographic crisis, and EVs? It's just an arrogant and lazy dismissal.

In Germany, long-established and entrenched processes and technologies are often confused with being reliable and safe.

Fax machines are still widely used, particularly in public administration and larger organizations in general.

The preposterous as well as appalling argument often heard in favour of this is that "fax is more secure than email" and somehow doesn't put privacy and the sacred German "data protection" at risk (because said data protection seemingly on applies to digital stuff).

Famously - or rather notoriously, during the pandemic local German health authorities faxed case numbers and other relevant data to federal authorities, which led to massively delayed response times and a general unavailability of dependable, actionable data.

Fax is still widely used in the American healthcare system for the same reason.

It's social reasoning rather than technical reasoning, combined with being excessively liability conscious and catering to the lowest common denominator.

If you communicate confidential data by email, or really anything that's electronic and remotely accessible, it's only a matter of time until someone with poor judgment opens up their work laptop with confidential data plastered all over the screen while sitting in the middle seat on an airplane.

> On the other hand, a fax machine is usually located in an office that's only physically accessible to people with badge access.

Well, again during the pandemic, the documentation of individual vaccinations in vaccination centres in Germany of course was done on reams of paper (because "more secure than digital" ...). That paper was then sent daily (via messenger, no less) to so-called "digitisation centres", where those piles of paper were scanned - and yes - turned into PDFs.

> Famously - or rather notoriously, during the pandemic local German health authorities faxed case numbers and other relevant data to federal authorities, which led to massively delayed response times and a general unavailability of dependable, actionable data.

Wasn't this in Switzerland? Or did it happen ALSO in Germany?

I don't know about Switzerland, but this very famously was known to be the case in Germany: https://www.dw.com/en/german-health-care-tackling-covid-with...

Oh well, so we had at least 2 countries counting COVID cases by fax. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/science/crunching-the-numbers_w... (couldn't find a better source, I think they even ended up weighing fax piles to count cases, but I'd like to verify that as it might as well be an urban legend).

i started on Unix/SunOS in 1990 then Linux in 1993 (i'm old) and even i have never even _seen_ a real 8" FD! i do recall using 5 1/4" FDs (though i can't remember what for).

Used 'em all. (UNIX, SunOS, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, etc,etc)

Though I started with a 5.25" single-sided single density floppy in 1978: 88 Kilobytes.

I actually upgraded to the 8" floppies about 4 years later, but by then it was double-sided, double density. I thought all my Christmasses had come at once to jump from 88 K to 1200 K in the blink of a eye. I transferred a whole 5" floppy to an 8" floppy and I still had more than a Megabyte of space left! Wheeeee!

Round about then the first IBM came out, and I remember we looked down our noses at that miserable little amount of floppy space it had (160K) and we considered it a toy!

We didn't think that way only 3 or 4 years later when that "toy" completely wiped out our 8-bit world.

8” after 5.25” would have been a downgrade I think? I was glad to see the back of former (the latter too of course, but a bit later)

Nope. Upgrade.

I explained how the 8" held far more data than the 5". The HD 5" 1.2 MB didn't appear till the late 80s, early 90s. The 8" 1.2 MB was around about ten years earlier.

8" floppy (IBM-3470 SSSD format was the standard format for CP/M software to be distributed on.)

You got 5" and 8" mixed up

Nope. CP/M software distribution standard floppy size was 8". (SSSD = IBM 3470 standard)

I had gone from North Star DOS (5") floppy to CP/M (8").

Which likely puts you in your 40's. That's not old, only in tech is that old.

I'm in my 30s, and my first computer as a kid had a 5.25" FDD. Fondest media-memory of that era was CD-ROMs coming in caddies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_%28hardware%29#/media/Fi...

I have seen them, during high school visit to our national TV in Portugal during early 90's.

Our national post still had punched tape communications infrastructure on those days as well.

Did it look like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzehb_yeZtU

When I started at Siemens in Boca Raton, FL ( of course it was Broken Sound Blvd) There were a lot of older PBXs with 8" floppy drives. When they threw one out, they allowed me ( a co-op at the time) to take it home. I still have the floppy drive. I wish I had thought to get a few of the floppy disks for it.

Dear German Navy. I have built disk emulators before[1]. Please contact me if you need help :D

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/aspeqt. Better maintained fork: https://github.com/RespeQt/RespeQt

What a weird thing to focus on. Even a modern warship is probably full of 74 series logic ICs which predate 8-inch floppies by several years. If the floppies did the job in 1994, why shouldn't they today? It's the same ship after all.

In 94 there were still companies in Germany making 8-inch floppies.

Can anyone speak to why those systems were considered more reliable? Are world agencies relying on this technology because of the inherent risk of rebuilding systems, or because of some attractive property of floppy disks?

Just speculating here, but floppy disks can be wiped out by a magnet. Not exactly the most robust storage solution.

So I would guess this is more about the friction of moving away from a legacy system, as opposed to the technological benefits of floppies.

flash wipes itself out just sitting without power for as little as a year, and of course is made out of fantastically complex microscopic electronics. A floppy is ridiculously more robust than that, in the same way paper is even more robust than floppy.

It actually takes a very very strong magnet in almost direct contact to alter a floppy.

I can tell you’ve either never used floppies, or used them so little that your opinion was formed more by luck than experience.

Floppies are ridiculously unreliable. They were bad, even when they were brand new in a new drive. Failure rates of one in thirty or so wasn’t unusual. Installing large software packages was a gamble because disc 27 of 33 might have a bad sector and ruin your day.

Floppies written with one drive often wouldn’t work in another.

The drives themselves would often collect dust depending on how the fans inside the PC case were set up.

The drive head would often wear out the floppies, especially if they were used daily (e.g.: boot discs).

Keeping them in a hot car in summer could destroy them.

I learned about forward error correction (FEC) in desperation when I was in my early teens because it was the only robust way to retain data on floppies for any length of time. There were a whole bunch of compression formats that could split your data so that any n-of-m floppies could be used to recover your data in case a few failed.

Adding to this in Windows 2000 days WinRar had error correcting bits you could enable and make the compressed rar file bigger. I ended up only using that when I would save something to a floppy it was so unreliable.

I know all of that, having used floppies since the 70's. And those are all other aspects that don't address or invalidate any of what I said.

Pretty sure it's the first one. New systems are inherently more complex which means more possibilities to screw things up.

The alternative is likely a bottom to top rearchitecture of the whole vessel, all the training, etc. Because you cant justify a modernization program centered around replacing floppy disks with ... What, USB? CD? You'd end up with a total modernization program if you're not careful.

Not a software dev, but I would say that some code written in something like Ada and working off a floppy has about a bazillion less leaky abstractions than the new systems which run an entire Linux system (the brand new US littoral combat ships did this) with who knows all what. The former runs for decades without any issue. The latter basically makes maintenance a never ending cost and chore.

It is similar to when my father's company switched from a mainframe that ran all their stuff and was written in the mid 80s to brand new off the shelf software. The replacement software is all about trying to make your needs fit into how the vendor's product works. His company unanimously believes the original software was significantly superior in terms of issues (it basically just ran for decades with almost no issues). The issue is the older tech keeps getting more niche, so you eventually kind of have to migrate sometimes.

I guess the reason why this is the case is that code at that time was much lower level, and often had exclusive control of the CPU. I've toyed around with microcontrollers before with Assembly and C, and I found it fairly easy to hold the entire mental model of what the system (registers & memory) is doing at each instruction. I feel this can lead to less bugs, as you can fully understand what each step is doing.

Compare that to something like JavaScript running in Electron, where at basically every line there is a chance that something could return an error or take away control of the CPU messing up your time dependant code. Of course there are ways to handle that, but it's a lot more complicated compared to a CPU your code runs on exclusively. Or you just run into bugs with third party code that you need to work around, or update a library and find a patch version introduced a breaking change.

This is probably why PLCs are so popular in industry. You can make sure a tiny part of the system works correctly and is bug free. Then as long as the contract of how it communicates & interacts with other parts of the system is defined properly, the system as a whole will operate correctly.

The floppy is just a visible artifact of a system that works, but is no longer easy to modify. Old systems often didn’t abstract away the implementation details of a floppy drive, so it might expect not a block storage, but rather something that actually behaves like a drive. It’s worth noting that current state-of-the-art emulation of Commodore 64 drive is still not perfect and fully compatible with all software.

They aren't reliable. Anyone who remembers floppy disks will remember how easily damaged they were, and that was back when the equipment was new. So for "reliable" read "avoids career risk".

Outside of the tech industry IT projects fail a lot, and they fail in ways that non-technical people do not/cannot/will not try to understand. From the perspective of your average middle ranking executive or civil servant any project involving computers is very likely to just randomly end up delivering nothing despite consuming tens of millions of dollars/euros. The phenomenon is utterly baffling to them and feels hopeless. Combine it with a rolling heads culture in which the organizational response to failure is firing / sidelining someone in order to show accountability (vs a rigorous post-mortem analysis), and you get a lot of organizational weirdness that boils down to everyone scrambling away from anything that involves technology modernization.

At some level the reason we have such a thing as a "tech company" or "startup" is because these are what we call organizations that aren't intimidated by software projects.

Government organizations are especially prone to ending up on obsolete 1980s/90s era tech because there's no market pressure or bonuses incentivizing them to improve things, because awareness of how often IT projects fail is much higher now than it was back then, and because civil servants are typically very focused on staying inside the civil service and making it to pensionable age. The bulk of their comp is weighted towards the end of their lives due to way more generous pensions than in the private sector so this gives them all an incentive to avoid any project that might have a concrete failure mode.

> outside of the tech industry IT projects fail a lot

Within the tech industry as well. Replacing a running system tends to be high-risk for various reasons.

Maybe I've been lucky but the failure rate I saw inside tech firms is much lower than the rates I've seen outside it. Yes it still happens, but it's rarer and people don't freak out about it. You don't see executive careers go down in flames because some grunt accidentally used an O(N^2) algorithm at the core of a system and the project hit some arbitrary deadline before they got it fixed. And a lot of the riskier attempts at replacing things get outsourced to startups where the risk:reward ratio is a lot healthier.

They are also far more able to react. When plan A farts, these sorts of shops have relatively simple time lashing up some kind of response to recover, and the damage is more inconvenience than disaster.

If someone were to offer me $436 million to replace some 8 inch floppy disks, I could probably use $435 million of it to build some pretty interesting products that have nothing to do with floppy disks...

They didn't. It is a bit more than that.

"The BAAINBw hired Saab for F123 updates. In July 2021, Saab announced winning a contract to "deliver and integrate new naval radars and fire control directors for and in the German Navy’s" F123s, with the work entailing "a new combat management system in order to completely overhaul the system currently in use on the F123, allowing a low risk integration of the new naval radars and fire control capabilities." The Swedish company said the deal was worth about 4.6 billion SEK (about $436,748,840)."

I wonder if there is a military grade chip equivalent to an Raspberry Pi? Or more ideally a RISC-V system that's similar.

Replacement could begin by emulating the 8 inch floppy drive's electrical interface and attaching a modern system.

The storage media should probably be some sort of flash memory rated for military use; I don't anticipate the size as an issue, nor most of the other specs.

The most critical factor is selecting a storage media that's intended for production and support for the next 50 years, since it seems clear these systems will _never_ be updated again.

Man, this would be fun to work on. Anyone know if they have any contracts open for bidding?

You can find out here: https://www.evergabe-online.de/

Here is the direct link to the exact bidding: https://www.evergabe-online.de/tenderdetails.html?3&id=69646...

Makes sense. If I pick up an 8-inch or 5¼-inch and put it in a a maintained drive it WILL read it, try that with a writable CD/DVD. Don't get me started on the bit-rot you can expect from a 2024 NVMe

It looks like these ships were laid down in '92, and commissioned a few years later, which seems very late to use 8" floppies.

They were on the way out but any equipment installed on a ship in the 90s would have been designed a lot earlier, and military equipment often lags due to long qualification times.

Just upgrade to 3.5" ones and call it a day.

They don’t fit into the slots. ;)

Better not. The bid would be won by "totally not Russian" vendor.

In high school we had a couple of (old even back then) Wang PCs with 8" floppy disks. The jokes wrote themselves.

i asked an ai to think of some jokes, and it came up with several categories of humor

> Nostalgia and Size Jokes: "Why did the Wang computer refuse to go to the party? Because it was afraid of getting stuck in the crowd with its massive 8" floppy disks!"

> Modern vs. Classic Tech: "Why did the Wang computer take up so much space? Because it couldn't fit in the tiny pockets of today's smartphones."

> Cloud Storage Comparison: "Did you hear about the Wang computer trying to upload its files to the cloud? It kept saying, 'I'll just leave these here on the table, they're too big for the cloud!'"

> Physical Strength Required: "Why did the Wang computer never go hiking? Because it couldn't handle carrying around those heavy 8" floppy disks."

> Compatibility Issues: "Why didn't the Wang computer ever play hide and seek? Because its 8" floppy disks were always too obvious and easy to find."

> Storage Capacity Humor: "Why did the Wang computer always carry a spare battery? Because its 8" floppy disks took forever to charge!"

Comedians should have no fear of AI taking their jobs.

US missile silos have same

Minuteman III retired 8" floppy disks 5 years ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy...

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