Sunday, October 20, 2019

Air Force Finally Retires 8" Floppy Drives

You may have seen this entertaining little story going around the last couple of days, but the Air Force has finally retired 8-inch floppies from the missile launch control system.  Those would be the strategic missile launch facilities.

Five years ago, Ars Technica reported on how shocked the CBS News program 60 Minutes was to find that 8 inch floppies were still used to store data for operating the Air Force's intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) command, control, and communications network. The system, once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), relied on IBM Series/1 computers installed by the Air Force at Minuteman II missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s.  Five years ago, the Air Force offered the view that the hardware (which virtually everyone thought was long obsolete) provided a cybersecurity advantage.  I can see their point to some extent; certainly nobody is going to casually leave an 8" floppy disk in the men's room as has been done with a USB drive

Today, the Air Force is singing a different tune.
[T]he service has completed an upgrade to what is now known as the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS), as Defense News reports. SAACS is an upgrade that swaps the floppy disk system for what Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force’s 595th Strategic Communications Squadron, described as a “highly secure solid state digital storage solution.” The floppy drives were fully retired in June. 
The IBM Series/1 computers remain, however, in part because of their reliability and security.  
Air Force officials have acknowledged network upgrades that have enhanced the speed and capacity of SACCS' communications systems, and a Government Accountability Office report in 2016 (28 page pdf) noted that the Air Force planned to "update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017." But it's not clear how much of that has been completed.
When I think of electronics from the '60s and '70s, my thought isn't "reliability" so much as "end of life".  I have some 1960s radios, in case you're wondering how I know.  Electronic components are often referred to as having a bathtub-shaped reliability curve; steep walls on both ends and a long flat bottom between the walls.  When the parts are first put into service, they go through a short period of "infant mortality" failures as various problems (both in fabrication of the parts and of assemblies they're in) cause the components to fail.  This is followed by a long period in which the failure rate is quite a bit lower and parts fail essentially at random.  Finally, parts wear out and fail - literally dying of old age - and the bathtub side curves upward again.  These computers should be well into these later failures, but they do get constant attention from folks very experienced with these computers; probably the greatest living experts on these systems.  I'm guessing they need this attention.  Along with lots of spare parts.

Ars notes:
Civilian Air Force employees with years of experience in electronics repairs handle the majority of the work. But the code that runs the system is still written by enlisted Air Force programmers.

For those who have forgotten what 8" floppies looked like - or never saw one.  These were pretty much considered obsolete when I first had a computer that I worked on as a technician in the late 1970s.  Our first computers around the house used 5-1/4 floppies that just were a smaller version of these, before the 3-1/2" floppies in a hard plastic case.  So, so long ago...



17 comments:

  1. I haven't even seen an 8" floppy since the late 1980's!

    I still have some brand-new-in-the-box 5-1/4" drives and blank discs.

    And all my Commodore stuff is on 5-1/4" floppies. Commodore had some 3-1/2" drives, but they came very late in the company's existence, and are extremely hard to find.

    And there's simply no way I'll pay the going rate ($500 or more) to get one.

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  2. @dr jim, iirc there is a CF adapter for the commodore available now. Check out 8bitguy on youtube for tons of commodore and other old pc content.

    @SiG, I last used an 8" floppy in about 1989 or 90. It contained the OS and data for a theatrical lighting control board/desk called the ChannelTrack. First used on Broadway on A Chorus Line, it was one of the first computer based control systems. Fun times!

    z

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    1. I last used an 8" floppy in about 1989 or 90. It contained the OS and data for a theatrical lighting control board/desk called the ChannelTrack. First used on Broadway on A Chorus Line, it was one of the first computer based control systems.
      That's cool, zuk! I don't recall ever using an 8" floppy, but if I did it would have been in the late '70s at work. I have filed away that the system had 5-1/4, the first ones - 180k storage, I think. I think the first one I had here (on my Commodore, like dr jim said) was "Double sided, double density" at 360k.

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    2. @zuk - Yes they do, and I have several! I also have port adapters that give me a real RS-232 port, adapters that give me a parallel port, and some video adapters, memory enhancements, and some fancy ROMS that have utilities built-in to them.

      Don't know why I keep the stuff around, but I do.....

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  3. We used these 8" floppy disks to store exam protocols and other system settings from the GE Max .5T MRI systems. That was circa 1999-91. They worked. That is all that can be asked from a technology.

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    1. The only problem with any floppy in today's computers is the storage density is so small that software can't be distributed on it. As far as being good for what they did, no problems. You'll get no arguments from me. And since the Air Force isn't putting the latest version games on their systems or software that requires a DVD ROM because of its size, it doesn't matter. Planned obsolescence for its own sake sucks.

      I'm still running Windows 7 on this box. About once a month, Microsoft pops up a window telling me that support for Win 7 ends in January and when I hit the "more info" link, it tells me I should get a new computer to support Windows 10. It's my understanding that Microsoft wants to go to Windows As a Service we subscribe to instead of an OS we buy.

      I have four computers in the house running Win 7. That's either four new computers to support 10 or four new copies of 10.

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    2. Or four new Linux installs!

      Seriously, you're kind of in the same boat we are. My wife won't use Linux, and I have some hardware that requires Windoze, so were 50/50 here; half "Bill's Best", and half Linus's stuff.

      All the PC's here running Windows have Win7 on them, with no plans to change.....

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    3. BTDT with Linux, at least three times. Unfortunately, these machines have Windows-only SW on them. Every one of them has something I wasn't able to find a good way around. That was last tried just about four years ago, and it's hard to get motivated to try it again.

      For what I do most of the time, Linux is fine, but going dual boot doesn't get rid of the "no more support for Win7" issue. It's one thing if all one does is use something like LibreOffice, email and web browsing, but throw in 3D CAD and CAM, running the CNC machines or the ham shack and next thing you know, you're back in the trap of using Windows because everyone's using Windows - which means everyone writes for Windows.

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    4. There's always VMware (the free for non-commercial use version) running under Linux and providing a virtual machine for windows.
      Even if you update your hardware to something newer/faster, you can continue to supply the 'old' hardware to windows to keep it happy.

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    5. There is also VirtualBox that was Sun and is now Oracle. I have used it for the last decade on top of Linux to run Windows 7. It got me through my late in life Masters Degree. I still run it some. The handiness of a virtulizer is much better than dual boot; I can flip back and forth from Linux to Windows with just a mouse click.

      WINE on Linux has gotten to the point that it runs a lot of Windows software on my main Linux computer. There are programs that are not well behaved.

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  4. This summer I tossed the AMD tower that had a couple 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives, and some opticals. Shortly afterward, I had three laptops develop problems, so I attempted to fire up the P4 tower that I had kept as the backup backup. No video signal from the video card, or from the motherboard. I never bothered to verify it ran, prior to tossing the slightly less powerful tower. The fact that I had to replace all the caps on the motherboard about '07 should have been a warning about its reliability. On top of that, the entire tower is a very heavy steel assembly, while the AMD had been aluminum. Sheesh.

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    1. One of those problem laptops was a borrowed Win10 system. Flaky and shaky. No wonder he replaced it, I was thinking. Then I fired up my new Win10 system. Holy crap! is this thing a PITA. No better than that other one, so, not a system problem, it's Win10 that sucks. That, or it doesn't play well with F-fox. Will be looking at Linux, and fixing my old Win7 system. Hmm, can I load 7 on the new system?

      I wonder how much effect having Microsoft being overrun by the Indian influx had on the change in company focus toward selling a service instead of an OS?

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  5. Unfortunately, no progress on 98% of the passwords picked by their general officers being "password".

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  6. Forced into a Win10 system when I had to buy a new box this summer - couldn't find a Win7 installation disk. I don't care for Win10 for many subtle "dislikes" reasons. I'd go back to Win7 if I could. MS doesn't support my older machines and they still work OK. My old XP box still works - and I did the same work then I'm doing now. I wonder ...

    Q

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  7. The last time I saw an 8" floppy was in 1990 inside a Minuteman III LCC (Launch Control Center). I was there to help switch out an HF radio that was acting up. I remember seeing the computer and another module in the rack that was a 64k RAM unit. Bases on the size, I assumed it was magnetic core memory. But researching IBM Series 1 now, main memory plugged directly into the main processor board. So maybe that memory was part of the Command Data Buffer, or another system?

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  8. While working for a defense contractor in the early '90s, the word came down that NORAD needed 8 inch floppies and was having trouble procuring them. As it happened, I had a couple left from grad school in the early '80s and donated them - for the national defense, of course.

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  9. Both at the defense contractor I worked at and the Air Force Logistic Center where I did my reserve duty, there were still 8" floppies in the early nineties to support old equipment.

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