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claimed they finished a migration from 8-inch floppy disks to solid state storage in June 2019, so my info is slightly out of date.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).
Doing a bit of research online, my info is slightly out of date.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That would be awesome. I hate having to find a cable to plug my SSD into. If it was simply a card that could be inserted into a slot, that would be so much easier.
Yeah that was the episode where shredder had some software that could create holographic clones of people. But Bebop and Rocksteady fucked up and caused the machine to make Shredder behave like Michaelangelo.
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.
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