8 inch floppies retired for Air Force ICBM launch control

tunatime said:
Only thing is most ssds are made in China kinda scary to think what some hacked ones could do
Click to expand...

I doubt they are putting in a direct order that identifies them. Probably easier just to pick some up at the local store and take one apart looking for any sketchy shit just to be on the safe side.
 
Verge said:
Yea, I tend to agree with the Air Force, can't hack a 50 year old floppy.
Click to expand...
Yeah, agreed.
Hopefully the new SSDs are proprietary and at least vetted for any hacks or identifiable alterations.

Hacking an 8" FDD from the early 1970s with something that could report data back to foreign entities would be difficult.
Doing so with a modern SSD is beyond easy; don't even need additional hardware, just altering the firmware may be enough.
 
Red Falcon said:
Yeah, agreed.
Hopefully the new SSDs are proprietary and at least vetted for any hacks or identifiable alterations.

Hacking an 8" FDD from the early 1970s with something that could report data back to foreign entities would be difficult.
Doing so with a modern SSD is beyond easy; don't even need additional hardware, just altering the firmware may be enough.
Click to expand...

Military contracts quite often specify unique/proprietary hardware and software for use and I don't see this as being any different. Beyond that you need to keep in mind that the systems using the SSDs are not connected to the internet or probably even a network in any way. Unless everyone procuring the hardware and those inspecting it are abysmally and terminally stupid there's no practical way of using the hardware or software on the hardware such as firmware to send any sort of data outside or allow for any type of control.
 
SmokeRngs said:
Military contracts quite often specify unique/proprietary hardware and software for use and I don't see this as being any different. Beyond that you need to keep in mind that the systems using the SSDs are not connected to the internet or probably even a network in any way. Unless everyone procuring the hardware and those inspecting it are abysmally and terminally stupid there's no practical way of using the hardware or software on the hardware such as firmware to send any sort of data outside or allow for any type of control.
Click to expand...
I would like to believe that, and I certainly hope you are right - for all of our sakes. :eek:
 
Verge said:
Yea, I tend to agree with the Air Force, can't hack a 50 year old floppy.
Click to expand...

Some people on VCF probably could. I couldn't, my floppy technology only goes back to the early 80s (5 1/4") I still have a pile of 360k disks kicking around. There are still formats from that time I can't read though, but the most common ones are easy enough.

SmokeRngs said:
Military contracts quite often specify unique/proprietary hardware and software for use and I don't see this as being any different. Beyond that you need to keep in mind that the systems using the SSDs are not connected to the internet or probably even a network in any way. Unless everyone procuring the hardware and those inspecting it are abysmally and terminally stupid there's no practical way of using the hardware or software on the hardware such as firmware to send any sort of data outside or allow for any type of control.
Click to expand...

With all of the bizarre spook tech I've seen and read about during the cold war and even today, if there's a will, there's a way. You don't need networked devices to leak information, all it takes is someone being an idiot and you end up with stuxnet.
 
I remember using 8" floppies as well as software on punch cards back in the mid 80's when I worked at a bank operations center. The big IBM 3890 sorters were still using the 8" floppies to load programming for the various sorting runs when we would do any "offline" sorting. One of the oldest mainframes there still had a punch card reader for loading software.
 
Archaea said:
When seconds count and your nuclear system uses floppy disks.


Should be some sort of meme. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
If I had to guess based on similar architectures I worked on, everything is loaded into RAM (i.e. DATARAM type boards) and ready for use. Only new data is loaded at set intervals from other systems using external storage (floppy, tape, etc). But, there is a way to use front end processors to interface with modern systems. If you look in my Modcomp picture, you see two large ribbon cables - those went to PCIe cards on a modern Windows systems during a transition period while upgrading to modern servers. It actually worked extremely well. It's insane to think you can interface reliably with systems that old. I'm sure the nuclear weapons system uses a similar setup. (or they will if they upgrade to keep everything online with zero downtime)
 
SmokeRngs said:
Military contracts quite often specify unique/proprietary hardware and software for use and I don't see this as being any different. Beyond that you need to keep in mind that the systems using the SSDs are not connected to the internet or probably even a network in any way. Unless everyone procuring the hardware and those inspecting it are abysmally and terminally stupid there's no practical way of using the hardware or software on the hardware such as firmware to send any sort of data outside or allow for any type of control.
Click to expand...
Network isn't the only attack vector. They could easily put a firmware bug in the SSDs so that they all fail at a certain date/time, leaving all our defense systems down/broken.
 
The only reason why they would have upgraded from floppies is because they're becoming too hard to source.
 
Mazzspeed said:
The only reason why they would have upgraded from floppies is because they're becoming too hard to source.
Click to expand...


Try IMPOSSIBLE. The 8 inch floppy only had a short career in CP/M. Every other micro computer only offered a a 5.25" disk option.

By 1980, even CP/M had abandoned the 8" floppy for 5.25".

The MASSIVE difference in popularity is the reason [url=https://www.amazon.com/Imation-Diskettes-Package-Double-Density/dp/B007BT9I4M/ref=pd_sbs_23_t_0/139-7283571-0752267?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B007BT9I4M&pd_rd_r=5ca5105b-51d1-49bc-8d53-e96652e1aa7d&pd_rd_w=KPatz&pd_rd_wg=IBEG8&pf_rd_p=5cfcfe89-300f-47d2-b1ad-a4e27203a02a&pf_rd_r=26X4545MG98EQ5K76NG6&psc=1&refRID=26X4545MG98EQ5K76NG6]you can still buy new 5.25" disks on Amazon[/URL]. They stopped making 8" discs at least two decades ago.

For 20 years they had to rely on spares, or finds on EBAY.
 
Last edited:
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
thesmokingman said:
It's more likely they had them manufactured for them at a ridiculous cost to tax payers.
Click to expand...

I doubt it. Paying to keep advanced fabs for DOD use active in the US makes sense, but wasting the same kind of money to idle an entire disk factory only one agency is using does not.

They probably made one last order before they closed the line, then sat on the things. Discs can keep 20+ years without losing data, if you treat them right

They've had plenty of warning about when they would run out., Turns out it wa s within the last couple years.
 
defaultluser said:
I doubt it. Paying to keep advanced fabs for DOD use active in the US makes sense, but wasting the same kind of money to idle an entire disk factory only one agency is using does not.

They probably made one last order before they closed the line, then sat on the things. Discs can keep 20+ years without losing data, if you treat them right

They've had plenty of warning about when they would run out., Turns out it wa s within the last couple years.
Click to expand...

Maybe... but this mylar. It's far from fab worthy or rocket science.
 
thesmokingman said:
Maybe... but this mylar. It's far from fab worthy or rocket science.
Click to expand...


Maybe so, but it was so complex it took them 3 years to develop it.

If they are so simple to make, why isn't anyone making them new?

The cost of building a RELIABLE magnetic media manufacturing line is no small cost, even for something as ancient as this. The cost is borne by fulfilling pent-up demand for your products.

The risk of making their own media on-demand would have been WAY higher than just replacing the media with flash, which is why they did it.

Finally, can you ;point me to any stories about the US Government keeping the line open at IBM? That sort of budget line item would have been covered in the 60 Minutes interview, at the very least.
 
Last edited:
Yea, um yer too into this man lol. The time to develop doesn't make the floppy a freaking complex part, lol.
 
thesmokingman said:
Yea, um yer too into this man lol. The time to develop doesn't make the floppy a freaking complex part, lol.
Click to expand...


No, but time = money. Getting them reliable is not cheap, and that would be the only way they could continue using them.

In my experience, DOD/Congress has finite lifetimes in which you can order spares from a contractor before the manufacturing line is spun down. This is the reason most purchases include anticipated needs PLUS spares, because it's massively more expensive to restart production for a small run.

Pretending like Nuclear Weapons group has some kind pf infinite money pit to throw at IBM to keep ,the production line open and churning out units is just silly. And if they did, it would have been mentioned by 60 Minutes in their report.

More likely: they probably ordered a bunch of spares when IBM closed the plant,
 
Last edited:
defaultluser said:
No, but time = money. Getting them reliable is not cheap, and that would be the only way they could continue using them.

In my experience, DOD/Congress has finite lifetimes in which you can order spares from a contractor before the manufacturing line is spun down. This is the reason most purchases include anticipated spares, because it's massively more expensive to restart production for a small run.

Pretending like Nuclear Weapons group has some kind pf infinite money pit to throw at IBM to keep ,the production line open and churning out units is just silly. And if they did, it would have been mentioned by 60 Minutes in their report.
Click to expand...

Yea ok. Like they have never blown $10K for a darn toilet seat cover before.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...3d325a-85df-11e8-8f6c-46cb43e3f306_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...3d325a-85df-11e8-8f6c-46cb43e3f306_story.html
Or like the DOD have never blown 97 billion in month to keep their precious budget from getting slashed.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/...000-on-a-chair-in-last-minute-spending-spree/
 
It's no different to the CRT based terminals, they're hardly going to source replacement tubes for the CRT based terminals when an LCD replacement is a viable option considering security concerns. Security and reliability are the biggest deciding factor's when considering alternatives for aging technologies in such a scenario.

Even 5.25" floppies are becoming scarce these days.
 
Last edited:
defaultluser said:
Try IMPOSSIBLE. The 8 inch floppy only had a short career in CP/M. Every other micro computer only offered a a 5.25" disk option.

By 1980, even CP/M had abandoned the 8" floppy for 5.25".
Click to expand...
Exactly, and 8" FDDs were extremely long in the tooth in the early 1980s and were all but gone by 1989 - 30 years ago.
Keeping this equipment alive and reliable, along with the stock of 35-45+ year old FDDs and diskettes must have been quite the task, and a costly one at that.

In comparison, a few years ago I actually ran across two 8" FDDs in an enclosure from 1988 with drives from the early 1980s - this would have been close one of the last 8" enclosures on the market.
I managed to get things going for a few minutes before both units totally died.

After inspecting the PCBs, upon touching some of the ICs, they literally crumbled and fell off.
Both drives, even when kept in a private collection, had fallen apart upon the advanced age, though the 24v PSU from the enclosure, and the enclosure itself, worked and performed perfectly.

Crazy to think this equipment is this old.
Also throwing this fun website out there: https://www.athana.com/

https://www.athana.com/html/diskette.html :D
 
Red Falcon said:
Exactly, and 8" FDDs were extremely long in the tooth in the early 1980s and were all but gone by 1989 - 30 years ago.
Keeping this equipment alive and reliable, along with the stock of 35-45+ year old FDDs and diskettes must have been quite the task, and a costly one at that.

In comparison, a few years ago I actually ran across two 8" FDDs in an enclosure from 1988 with drives from the early 1980s - this would have been close one of the last 8" enclosures on the market.
I managed to get things going for a few minutes before both units totally died.

After inspecting the PCBs, upon touching some of the ICs, they literally crumbled and fell off.
Both drives, even when kept in a private collection, had fallen apart upon the advanced age, though the 24v PSU from the enclosure, and the enclosure itself, worked and performed perfectly.

Crazy to think this equipment is this old.
Also throwing this fun website out there: https://www.athana.com/

https://www.athana.com/html/diskette.html :D
Click to expand...

As a retro computing enthusiast, one of the biggest problems with all my old magnetic media is that it's all shedding it's magnetic material with age. As a result most of my old disks are beginning to magnetize the heads resulting in read errors until they demagnetize. Luckily we have solutions using USB thumb drives these days.
 
First what it's worth, if you find yourself in a situation where you have to read a floppy and the drive has been idle for a long time take a 'junk' floppy and do a format of it. That will knock the dirt off the read heads instead of putting it on the disk you need.

I still have to deal with some vaxes and alphas running vms at work. (Industrial control systems) was able to get the most important ones converted to an emulated system running on modern hardware.

We are slowly upgrading, so our upgraded areas become the source of our spare parts.
 
w1retap said:
I keep a stash of brand new ones for scenarios like this. 260 to be exact, haha.

View attachment 194158
Click to expand...

OK, first off, +1 for Verbatim, my favorite floppy brand hands down. I had random brand floppies bite the dust all the time, but the Verbatims were workhorses. My favorites were the colored ones, but those were for "special" stuff, not the bulk stack storage.

Cool. But.... why? You want to keep your C64 + 1541 pure and not emulated? I sold my last C64, 1541 or 1571 can't remember, and like 600 floppies back in 1992.

I kept about 10 3.5" floppies (dos 6.21, and some misc diagnostic stuff) and the rest of it went bye bye 20 years ago. My VHS collection went 10 years ago. My DVD collection has been dwindling since then but I bet I have at least 300 collecting dust. Same for CDs... I tried to sell CDs, VHS, DVDs, and LPs at a garage sale 5-7 years ago... sold a handful of each barely made a dent. Whenever I move again, the legit stuff is going to goodwill and the non-legit is finding a dumpster somewhere.
 
Last edited:
I just wanted to save them since they were being thrown out. Plus, I have a stash of old computers, some with 5.25" 1.2MB drives.

rQFvQMv.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top