this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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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claimed they finished a migration from 8-inch floppy disks to solid state storage in June 2019, so my info is slightly out of date.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:
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Doing a bit of research online, my info is slightly out of date.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"
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