US military will no longer use 8" floppy disks to coordinate nuke launches

[crazytown]

WTF.

US military will no longer use floppy disks to coordinate nuke launches
It now has a "highly-secure solid state digital storage solution."

As we alarmingly learned in 2014, the US military has been using 8-inch floppy disks in an antiquated '70s computer to receive nuclear launch orders from the President. Now, the US strategic command has announced that it has replaced the drives with a "highly-secure solid state digital storage solution," Lt. Col. Jason Rossi told c4isrnet.com.

The storage is used in an ancient system called the Strategic Automated Command and Control System, or SACCS. It's used by US nuclear forces to send emergency action messages from command centers to field forces, and is unhackable precisely because it was created long before the internet existed. "You can't hack something that doesn't have an IP address. It's a very unique system -- it is old and it is very good," Rossi said.

The Defense Department planned to replace the old IBM Series/1 SACCS computer and "update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017," it said in 2016. The Air Force hasn't revealed whether that project is complete, but did say that it has enhanced the speed and connectivity of SACCS.

Despite the age of the system, the Air Force is confident in its security and has a pretty good handle on maintaining it. By contrast, installing an all-new system isn't as easy as it sounds. "You have to be able to certify that an adversary can't take control of that weapon, that the weapon will be able to do what it's supposed to do when you call on it," said Air Force Scientific Advisory Board chair Dr. Werner JA Dahm back in 2016.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/10/18/us-military-nuclear-missiles-floppy-disks/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubWFjc3VyZmVyLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAANyWfvG927T2hO_RMfpEd8wsuGkBhOe_RsutsDXOewiQnLZPFK7mK1WKd-kOPenkREzbCjM1Yi8PuLqgsoGCcc3huGJET7AqQnqQVIlnAzIyXN0Zx7cIRS4jGoiqu6MP7Wu0BLXh4ex8dZS5xag3HTg_78GV1W69BKwIaa84Fq4S

[underpants]

1. I had no idea

[USALiberal]

2. Lol, amazing! Nt

[Downtown Hound]

3. I heard they upgraded to that all new Windows 95

that's so popular these days.

[lastlib]

37. Amazing! They leapfrogged the stone knives and bearskins!

To revise my literary hero Arthur C. Clarke, "Any technology sufficiently BACKWARDS is indistinguishable from magic."

(I wonder how they worked around DOS 3.3 ............. )

[Historic NY]

4. OMG....were doomed

[Baitball Blogger]

5. +1

[harumph]

6. Old system is reliable and unhackable -

Anything that isn't air gapped is an accident waiting to happen.

[tblue37]

8. +1. nt

[JHB]

13. Yup. The age of the system wound up giving it extra security.

[lindysalsagal]

7. And now I'm supposed to sleep at night?

[Locrian]

9. are those connected to the woper?

[Brother Buzz]

10. Only for the solitaire games

Tic-tac-toe is the wicked cool game

[Blue_Tires]

36. YES!

[ansible]

11. oh god, gives me bad flashbacks of how unreliable floppy disks were with bad sectors

Had to handle them like it was the most delicate thing in the world

[jeffreyi]

12. Hey, you can't hack an 8" floppy

Gee that's old. I still have some 5 inchers around, I think...

[crazytown]

14. Bad sectors?

Magnetic material exposed to the air.

[jeffreyi]

15. Ok, clever and tricky, but not the most stable.

I concede. Damn. Was hoping those old 5" floppies I have were worth something. 5 inch floppies would be the upgrade!

[crazytown]

17. I'm thinking Zip drives

Soooo reliable

[jeffreyi]

29. (Slightly chagrined)

I think I have a few of those around, too. Maybe I have too much stuff?

[TheRealNorth]

28. I am refurbishing an old computer of mine that still has a 3 1/2 floppy drive

Still have some old floppies too.

[Ms. Toad]

33. I definitely have 5.25s around.

But my reaction was the same - probably a lot safer than anything else these days.

[hunter]

16. No USB ports, no internet connections, fewer security risks.

I have an 8 inch floppy drive in my garage but I haven't started it up in many years.

But you never know when you might need one...

[crazytown]

18. Calling Major Kong, Major Kong?

A: Kong here. Q: What's the problem Major?
A: Bad sectors on the damn floppy.

[yonder]

19. Off topic, but our desk shares space with our current laptop AND an old Gateway desktop

that I still use for occasional CAD drafting work. It has both 3.5 and 5.0 inch drives. Somewhere around here are some old 5 inch floppies with older survey coordinate files on them.

So, with a fresh cup of coffee I think I'll look for them and try downloading that data.

Thanks for the reminder - could be fun. Or not.

[pecosbob]

20. Last software I used on five inch floppies was AutoCAD 2.0 I believe

so that would make it about thirty-five years ago.

I'm sure they'll choose a great solution from Diebold on Huawei hardware.

[TeamPooka]

21. Finally upgrading from their Commodore 64s.

[braddy]

22. We can't lose the arms race, this is catch up with

[Caliman73]

23. Once we get Skynet up and running, all our worries will be over.

[imanamerican63]

24. Get Smart!

No really, Get Maxwell Smart, Agent 99!

[Wounded Bear]

25. I'm sure Huawei has some good upgrade system solutions...

[smirkymonkey]

26. Is this for real?

I really can't tell these days what is satire and what is real.

[klook]

27. Don't forget to install Kaspersky AV! (nt)

[still_one]

30. The last time I saw 8" floppy drives was 15 years ago, and that was at electronic surprlus stores

where people buy thing for parts. nothing like keeping up with the times

[Fla Dem]

31. Actualy with the floppy disks were probably more secure.

No one still has the knowledge or software to be able to hack them.

[fescuerescue]

35. Ahem

That was a hobby of mine back in the day. Cracking the copy protection schemes on floppies. Even got a 5 1/4 drive in my closet not 10 foot from where I type.

They were actually quite easy to hack. Since the boot code was not encrypted and always started in sector #1, all you needed was a sector sector reader and the ability to read assembly.

Anyway.. Yea us old guys are still around and we have still have closets full of stuff

[LiberalFighter]

32. Trump probably told them to use 16" disks.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

34. but will they upgrade to the TI 99/4A computer?

8" floppies are soooo S100.

[lpbk2713]

38. I have one in my garage I can sell them for cheap.

Cartridges and manuals galore.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

39. mine collects dust, too ...

Have one with PEB and Gram Kracker, but the following works pretty well when nostalgia occasionally jumps up:

http://www.mrousseau.org/programs/ti99sim/

[lpbk2713]

40. Hey thanks.

I'm gonna check that out.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

42. welcome. has worked for me for years

Biggest problem is getting the cartridges transferred. I believe I used a null modem cable and v9t9 for the transfers from TI to a PC, running either dosemu or dosbox.

This was going to be my fallback to read the carts, if the above didn't work:

Cheapo TI-99/4A GROM reader

[cos dem]

41. Interesting. I had very much the same experience, but it was 25 years ago.

We had to put together a system for USAF using IBM Series/1. Even at the time they were obsolete. They were pretty common in some of the early grocery store scanners, so surplus gear wasn't too hard to find. IBM had a "special" relation with the DoD, and got their systems written into a lot of specifications. I remember one spec in particular stating that "the floppy disk shall have a capacity of X". I don't remember X, but it was in the 100s of kbytes. The spec was not "at least X", it was exactly "X". Funny, it was the exact capacity of the IBM Series/1 floppy disk.

I picked up a copy of Byte and found an ad in the back for a media shop stating "we still carry 8" floppies". I called them and asked how many boxes they had in stock. I bought all 3. Their ad in the next issue of Byte did not make that claim anymore.

I estimated the hard drives on these things were about 2lb/MB. The drive was 50 MB, and weighed 100 lbs. It required 208 3-phase to operate.

Although it is long obsolete, it is a bit gratifying to see how long some of this old stuff can last. It really was built to last. The crap coming out now has no hope of making it anywhere close to 40.