The US nuclear arsenal still runs on floppy disks.
EDIT: The Air Force claimed they finished a migration from 8-inch floppy disks to solid state storage in June 2019, so my info is slightly out of date. They did use floppy disks for over 50 years though (1968-2019).
The thing with random internet replies: you never know if it’s true (you could look it up, but that would make life to easy).
So this is or:
- really scary
- unbelievable smart cause nobody knows how to use them
- not true
Probably there are some other options but I’ll go for a combination of the first and second one and hoping for the third
Doing a bit of research online, my info is slightly out of date. They used floppy disks from 1968 to 2019. In 2019, they migrated from the old 8 inch floppy to “highly secure solid-state storage”. They don’t specify what type of solid state storage they actually use now though.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html
3.5" is much more solid than 8" floppies.
Fair point
I’d guess it’s one of these.
The R in smart looked like an H at first. Was wondering if they made these in Maine.
“Highly secure solid-state storage”
Probably used the same encryption scheme on an SD card adapter that plugs directly into the floppy drive lol.
Like one of those old cassette tapes with a headphone cable when MP3 players first came out and cars didn’t have adapters? Lol
Thanks this makes me feel (a bit) more secure…
It was true at one point, but has since changed. The systems are totally air-gapped and worked 100% of the time, so there was never a reason to change them.
Also true: Boeing still uses floppies to update their 747s.
Yup, we don’t want it to crash.
Eh? You can verify bit for bit that a digital transfer off an SSD was successful.
yea but SSDs are not reliable enough. random bit flips from cosmic events, degradation of data if unpowered for a long time, can only be written to so many times
they are VERY reliable for casual PC use or even server storage but not for something that could start ww3 if it glitches
also, as some other people said, dont change something that already works
That has nothing to do with file transfer (“updating”), just long term storage. It’s also a solved problem. You can solve it at the software level with modern self-healing filesystems.
It boils down to “never change a running system”
Laughs in Linux
It’s not the disks it’s what’s ON the disks
Supposedly on the disks. The files were saved, but did the FAT table eat itself was the question. 😂
FAT table eat itself
heh
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And they always act as if there’s no way it could have been copied and exist somewhere else.
But my dude… Diskettes had Copy Protection! /s
Yeah! The little plastic slider you moved up and down.
On commerical disks those are fixed on the frame (but can be flexed/cut away of course)
…and they only protect the data on the disk from being changed, you can still copy it. Otherwise the disk would be unreadable.
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Well, often it was a game of super spy keepaway and no one ever made it to a computer or had the code or the data was to save a good guy or whatever
To THE computer, wherever that was. When i learned Basic in 1986/87, the only computers i had access to, were those we used in class.
Yeah, after class, homework consisted of writing code on paper. Copilot = Basic Book
Like, for what purpose you’d have a computer at home?
Iirc Basic was the first, non-scientist friendly programming language. I saw an ad in the newspapers and signed up. We were 6 students in total and the first people ( not working in any scientific field ) in our small town, which knew how to use a computer and write the code for the beloved starfield screen saver in Basic.
Edit: having watched war games 3 years prior, when i was 13, i really felt like a spy doing secret stuff.
Iirc Basic was the first, non-scientist friendly programming language.
COBOL predates it, having first been introduced in 1959. BASIC came about in 1963.
An embarrassing snapshot of spongebob at the Christmas party?
I remember when floppies where called floppy because they were huge and floppy (that’s what she said). Before the hard shell smaller floppies became a thing.
The disk part was still floppy.
Still, hard floppys was really easy to damage - fart near it, and it’s unreadable
My favorite thing was messing with the metal slider until it broke.
Fidge spinners of their time
It was that or ballpoint pens. Good thing we still have the latter since even fidget spinners seem to have disappeared
And you could make a little USS Enterprise out of the metal parts! :D
Pic? I’ve never heard of this.
I got you fam. Good news: I didn’t just imagine this, it turns out! 😁
https://methodshop.com/make-a-starship-enterprise-out-of-a-floppy-disk/
Oh, the D! Now I get it.
Thank you so much!
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Shhhck… SNAP. Shhhck… SNAP.
I think in the later dying days of the floppy disk, the manufacturers made them with really poor quality. It used to be in earlier years, say the 8-bit years when floppy disks were still floppy, that the disks could keep your data for years if you treated them like vinyl records and never touched the magnetic surface.
In the late years, I’ve seen floppy disks that failed almost immediately.
They weren’t that bad. Hell AOL mailed millions of those damn things in envelopes and they usually worked.
Tape over the read only hole and reuse it: H A C K E R M A N
I always made sure to grab a dozen of those for homework on my way out of CompUSA.
Had a teacher one time draw a grid on her whiteboard with a space for each student, and she asked us to place our disks with our projects on the board with a magnet (so we wouldn’t lose them). The school had recently gotten rid of the old dusty chalkboard, and was really enamored with her new whiteboard and showing off her fridge magnet collection.
Luckily, someone pointed out why that was a bad idea before anyone did it, and she quickly changed her mind.
Woolsey! We need a stargate community :D
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
Look it’s the EMH… Err ummm. ❤️❤️❤️
The most important 1.44 MB you can imagine.
what are all these old memes doing with save icons? /s
SAVING THE WORLD
My first porn was on floppy disk
There’s something poetic about using a floppy disk to get hard
I wonder if they could now make floppy disks with the same form factor but modern tech
Like this?
Haha, that’s cool
I thought it was gonna be a USB drive but this works too
If you put a small, double sided optical disk inside, you could probably get a few hundred gigs in there, maybe even up to a terrabyte or three. If you put flash storage, you could fit a few dozen terrabytes. Hell, you could build that yourself if you just bought a bunch of microsd cards and soldered the contacts into a different form factor
My first porn was probably NNTP (newsgroups) before I even had the actual WWW. Had to learn how to stitch images together from multiple posts in the early-mid '90s.
4chan… I rolled the fucking dice and lost I guess.
UUE decoding!
Forté Agent was a blessing
I thought the name sounded super familiar, but I had to look it up. My dad was into BBS and CompuServ in the '80s. He eventually got AOL, which is where I got started with NNTP. I really need to get his history on these things. I know that, when I was super young in the early '80s when they divorced, he was often spending a lot of time online. I’d really like to know more about that era as my memories are scattered and fractured.
3.5", 5.25" or the monster 8" is the question…
I downloaded my first porn from Kazaa, over dial-up.
Shredder had a zip disk
He would
Who said they still cant?
They can, actually… Many nuclear bases in the US use floppy disks for code to reduce the risk of a cyberattack and because upgrading that intricate of a system is prohibitively expensive for how little good it would do.
private keys fit in a floppy disk, and their use range includes ransomware decryption and identity verification. In Mr. Robot, all 9-M could’ve been undone with a floppy.
Who would win? Thirty years of US security and tech, or one magnet boi?
Well considering most code is under a megabyte it makes sense
Nowadays it’s all data crystals.
Stargate did it.
And Star Trek and Star Wars and probably Galaxy Quest
Babylon 5 as well.
Nowadays it’s microSD cards.
I mean, microSD makes for much more interesting drama. You can hide it in the lining of a suit, sew it underneath the skin, hide it in a ball point pen, in your pet. MicroSd drama is much more sneaky.
Nah. Nuclear launch sites just retired 8" floppies required for launch verification like maybe 5 years ago.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html
I remember when movies/games first started using UBS sticks to contain important plot-macguffin data, it seemed very high-tech and expensive. Of course, now high-capacity sticks are incredibly cheap so anyone can have a whole drawer of them.
I liked when they used minidisks. It looked high tech and you could toss it around, unlike a cd. And it was bigger than a usb stick, so it was a better plot device.
Remember a Decepticon that transformed into a cassette?
Poor Soundwave, he and his minions are obsolete! Maybe they can get upgrades so he transforms into an MP3 player and they transform into SD cards.
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Leading to intergalactic war accidentally started by DankPods.
Soundwave was prepared for humans to be hostile to his kind.
He hadn’t counted on the 1 grit.
To say nothing of his new rival, Scarlet Fire.
Gotta be at some very specific places to fool people with that in 2023
It’s a goober
