Good News – America's Nuke Arsenal to Swap Eight-Inch Floppy Disks for Solid-State Drives
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Good news - America's nuke arsenal to swap eight-inch floppy disks for solid-state drives
The US Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) has reportedly replaced the ancient eight-inch floppy disks it uses to store data on the US nuclear arsenal.
Defense news site C4ISRNET today cites officers from the Air Force 595th Strategic Communications Squadron - the unit that actually manages the system - in reporting that earlier this summer, the antiquated IBM floppy drives were replaced with what was described as a "highly-secure solid state digital storage solution."
[...] The eight inch disks, developed in the 1960s at IBM's San Jose skunkworks, each held about 80KB of data on the current state of the nation's nuclear forces. The drives had been among the units slated for replacement as part of a "modernization" effort.
Emphasis on the quote marks, as in this case there is still plenty of 1970s tech that is going to continue being used. The report notes that the Air Force favors the Series/1 machine for SACCS in part because the ancient machine cannot be accessed with conventional network protocols, adding extra layers of security to the program.
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