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posted by Woods on Tuesday April 29 2014, @02:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the still-better-than-laserdisc dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday April 29 2014, @03:42PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 29 2014, @03:42PM (#37707)

    "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".

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday April 29 2014, @04:03PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 29 2014, @04:03PM (#37719)

    "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.