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Ars Technica reports that the US government built facilities for the Minuteman missiles in the 1960s and 1970s and although the missiles have been upgraded numerous times to make them safer and more reliable, the bases themselves haven't changed much and there isn't a lot of incentive to upgrade them. ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein told Leslie Stahl from "60 Minutes" that the bases have extremely tight IT and cyber security, because they're not Internet-connected and they use such old hardware and software. "A few years ago we did a complete analysis of our entire network," says Weinstein. "Cyber engineers found out that the system is extremely safe and extremely secure in the way it's developed." While on the base, missileers showed Stahl the 8-inch floppy disks, marked "Top Secret," which are used with the computer that handles what was once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), a communication system that delivers launch commands to US missile forces. Later, in an interview with Weinstein, Stahl described the disk she was shown as "gigantic," and said she had never seen one that big. Weinstein explained, "Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Tuesday April 29 2014, @03:18PM
I wonder where they go to get such ancient tech. I suppose they must be keeping some lucky manufacturer of such otherwise obsolete equipment in business. These things wear out and break down, and I highly doubt that they still have a lot of the original hardware that was installed when they were state of the art forty years ago. I don't even know where you can buy even 5¼" floppies these days, which is what I used to use with my first real computer, much less obtain a newly manufactured disk drive to read and write to the same.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Tuesday April 29 2014, @03:32PM
It could just be a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Especially when nuclear armageddon is one of the consequences of a "glitch" in the upgrade...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday April 29 2014, @03:42PM
"I don't even know where you can buy even 5¼" floppies these days"
Try google. Floppydisk.com sells NIB 5.25 disks for about eighty cents a piece, a good price. A brand new in box 3.5 inch drive is around $20-$40 with the higher price more likely to honestly be NIB as opposed to pulls.
Talk to the retrocomputing people and you'll get some good leads. .mil of course doesn't need this, they just fill a warehouse at initial construction and let the internal supply system "do its thing".
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday April 29 2014, @04:03PM
"Talk to the retrocomputing people and you'll get some good leads"
And about two minutes ago the classiccmp.org mailing list guys were discussing that the same floppydisk.com site sells 8 inch sealed in box disks (aka new in box) for merely 10x the cost of similar sealed in box new retail 5.25 disks, although its not terribly popular so they don't advertise it on the site. So $90 will get you ten new 8 inch disks.
Its actually cheaper to buy NIB 5.25 from floppydisk.com than NIB 3.5 from amazon in some situations, which is kinda weird.