On 4/28/2014 3:10 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
On Apr 28, 2014, at 14:56 , Thomas Dzubin <dzubint
at vcn.bc.ca> wrote:
The American TV Show "60 minutes"
showed 8-inch floppies are still
being used by the military
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/60-minutes-shocked-to…
To a certain extent, I'm a fan of "if it works, don't fix it".
However, with aging hardware using consumables that are no longer in production such as
8" floppy disks, there's risk in using the old hardware.
As silly as it seems to keep on using 8" floppies in mission-critical hardware in
2014, if some company resumed manufacturing old floppy disks for .mil and was willing to
also sell to us collectors, I'd be happy to stock up if the pricing wasn't too
insane.
The mission that these are used in require a medium that can be
destroyed quickly and effectively if need be. A fire and or small bits
of ground media ensure that.
i don't think they quite trust media such as flash parts yet because
they can be swapped and altered, and are not that easy to destroy at
least to ensure destruction.
I know the military also had a requirement which was that media could
be verified as not physically altered, and they went nuts for worm
technology. In the end suppliers never developed to supply the devices
or the media.
They were using 8" floppies which were considered to be going out of
date in 1981 or so.
I am not sure if they do it anymore but at one time they used special
tapes for targeting information which were recorded with heat and could
not be altered. I had a large supply from a Nike/Ajax site in Kansas
City which were recorded that way. At the time in the late 60's this
media was very desirable because of recycling into audio use, but there
was no way to erase the tapes for such use.
The tapes were used for similar components of the command authority
chain as the 8" floppies are.
jim