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Comment by toufka | Hacker News Reader

The military still use bolts! And screws! And I bet if you look really hard you can find a copper wire! Some of these things are hundreds of years old!

If it works, why change it? So long as they can find a supplier of new floppy disks for the data, it seems pretty reasonable to me (and given they're nuclear missiles, a few dozen grand per disc really doesn't seem that bad). Now if there are no more suppliers of those disks at all, and no way to read/write to them (at all), then we should start being a bit more concerned.

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I just gave a talk at RailsConf and demoed a web app running on a floppy disk. http://tech.pollev.com/articles/html5-app-on-a-floppy/

You can buy a USB floppy drive off Amazon for $15 and a 10 pack of floppies for $10. Surprisingly the disk drive is recognized on Mac OS X and ticks away like a champ.

I saw that talk! A bit slow at starting up, but really not any worse than a few seconds of high network latency, and then your web app basically worked like a champ.

45 seconds of "latency" to be exact!

If there's one situation where you definitely want to apply the rule "if it's not broke, don't fix it", it's probably nuclear missile silos.

That's hardly an appropriate comparison. The reason it's strange that they're still using floppy disks is that much better alternatives exist today.

That said, I agree that, so long as it does the job, there's no real reason to change.

I'm wondering if it works better then current technology. If the old tech is more stable and easier to upkeep than upgrading to a modern system, then power to them. I suspect it's more of a priorities thing where the DoD rather throw money at drones or a cyber unit then on nuclear weapon systems since those are more relevant to today's world.

I don't think there are many people who live through that time, who would describe a floppy disk as "stable" and "easy to upkeep".

I suppose the main contention is that copper, bolts, and screws last much longer than vinyl/magnetic strips.

The longevity and ease of destruction is probably a primary concern for this media.

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