Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/16/german-navy-still-using-8-inch-floppy-disks.html
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It might be more reliable, until you’re faced with an EMP
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Wouldn’t an EMP affect any digital/electronic storage medium?
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I have one on my shelf in my office, it belonged to my old Boss. I believe it was used in a word processing system .
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Battlestar Galactica survived because they never upgraded their tech, no?
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They could jump into the future and use zip drives /s
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You should get a recordable laserdisc
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That is actually kind of funny, I just pulled an old Laserdisc player out of a storage closet to see if it still worked last week.
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I’ve debated on buying one of those recordable ones just out of pure novelty of having it. But my SO would not be as amused as i would be 
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For years the US military was criticized for using outdated floppy disks for the ICBM systems. Personally I always found that to be comforting, in that it seemed like a system that would be extraordinarily difficult or impossible to hack into online. But they finally made the update to more modern systems a few years ago, so we best beware of Cylons and Russian hackers now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html
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Mentioned this on a different thread earlier this year. One computer at work is used for programming an avionics box that hasn’t been made since the '80s but is still in use in the world. It uses the large floppy format. The computer can’t support an upgrade and there are no funds to update to a newer technology. We have to get repair parts off ebay whenever it breaks.
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I feel like computers that old can probably be run as a virtual machine on newer hardware, but not being in that type of field i don’t know what the pitfalls are with that 
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Mine was the boot disk for an LSI-11 that was the boot controller for a VAX 11/780. It sits next to an RM03 cartridge whose platters have some really bright (even 40 years later!) concentric circles etched into them from a bouncing read/write head assembly.
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Back in the mid/late 80s, we used those at a job I had. They’d hold a full megabyte!
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I want to get a stack of those suckers, make a low budget movie and then just sell it on laserdisc… no one would be able to watch it, because… laserdisc, but I could say I made a movie and put it on recordable laserdisc!
At this point in human history, I have very humble goals.
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I can imagine a magnetic storage medium is harder to harden against it, but I might be wrong.
Some one would watch it because there are film nerds with large laser disc collections and players out there.
I have Star Wars on this very expensive box set of laser discs. I have gotten to watch it, and IIRC this port was what was later put on DVD and is the best example of the original film pre-Special Edition.
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The media is very reliable, but the drives are wearing out and unobtanium, even for militaries. Nobody is making them.
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Yeah, but… I won’t be able to quit my day job, so…
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What puzzles me slightly is the timeline. Apparently the design(of the frigate) was requested in 1989; at which time the 8in disks were already on the way out. Shugart and Wang were already saying nasty things about the viability of the 8in back in 1976; and 5.25 were common, albeit as several squabbling standards, by the early 80s.
I’d assume that the 8-ins got dragged in thanks to the inclusion of some existing subsystem that was designed a fair while before the boat it was installed on; but between stuff lost in translation and the Germans perhaps being a trifle cagey about the details of their military ship systems I don’t have a specific candidate subsystem in mind.
Were 8in disks ever the more conservative and reliable option, with those crazy kids and their cut-price microcomputers cutting corners that Serious Customers simply wouldn’t? I never really used them, aside from some retrocomputing curiosity; but I never heard anything, in relation to the 5.25 or 3.5in, about how they don’t make them like they used to. I can only imagine that some salt air and the brisk vibration of a naval environment wouldn’t help them any.
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