Are they really 8" or are they just trying to hide the fact their floppies are only 5.25". Inquiring minds want to know.
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It reminds me of an old joke:
Have you heard about the latest virus?
It turns your 5.25" hard drive into a 3.5" floppy.
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Yeah, I had one that was formatted to 1.8MB (I think) instead of 1.44 and I could only use it on an IBM PS/2.
EDIT: I also remember using a word processor (i.e. a typewriter with an LED screen and some form of file system) during college. It used something smaller than 3.5" disks but I canât remember if it was some proprietary format for that machine. The person who owned it had just the one floppy disk that came with the machine. I borrowed the machine for the last paper that I wrote for college. The disk started crapping out the night that I was trying to finish; I vaguely recall loading what I could (where ever I had left off earlier) and then manually typing the rest.
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This isnât really news, is it? http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/60-minutes-shocked-to-find-8-inch-floppies-drive-nuclear-deterrent/
Hard to imagine that anything would have changed significantly in just two yearsâŚ
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Yeah I heard this story a year or two ago too.
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(my replacement for likes, since I never have enough)
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Nope, itâs been the same story since late 1960s.
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Donât wory about the software. The hardware doesnât work either:
Iâll bet security has something to do with it. You canât hack stuff like that.
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Yeah, but they store the target data right? The worst thing that can happen is that the the nukes canât launch. All that matters is that our enemies think they will probably launch. Nukes are meant to be stockpiled, not used.
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Punching a notch on the edge of an 8" floppy would write-protect it. It was the opposite of the way 5.25" write protection worked.
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How is a computer built with 8 inch floppy drives going to read a USB stick?
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You can quite easily hack it, but without any connections to the outside world a hacker would need to breach their physical security to do so, which in theory is much harder. In practice, on the other handâŚ
That sounds like Amstrad CPC âdisksâ, which were actually weird little tape carts that were awful.
Here is why the pentagon used floppy disks based on Deutschland 83.
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At first I read it as âfloppy dicksâ, as if the missiles were some weird exercise in phallic symbolism.
Fortunately, the Colossus/Guardian network uses magnetic reels and superconducting magnetic cores for storage, which are more reliable than floppies.
But this has only led to other kinds of breakdownsâŚ
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I find it totally satisfactory that our strategic rocket forces cannot be controlled remotely with a smartphone app.
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Maybe itâs just my privilege talking, but the first scenario doesnât seem like anything to brag about.
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Do you really want our ICBM arsenal to be easy to launch?
