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German Navy still uses 8-inch floppy disks, working on emulating a replacement
- ricktdotorg 2y agoi started on Unix/SunOS in 1990 then Linux in 1993 (i'm old) and even i have never even _seen_ a real 8" FD! i do recall using 5 1/4" FDs (though i can't remember what for).
- simonblack 2y agoUsed 'em all. (UNIX, SunOS, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, etc,etc) Though I started with a 5.25" single-sided single density floppy in 1978: 88 Kilobytes. I actually upgraded to the 8" floppies about 4 years later, but by then it was double-sided, double density. I thought all my Christmasses had come at once to jump from 88 K to 1200 K in the blink of a eye. I transferred a whole 5" floppy to an 8" floppy and I still had more than a Megabyte of space left! Wheeeee! Round about then the first IBM came out, and I remember we looked down our noses at that miserable little amount of floppy space it had (160K) and we considered it a toy! We didn't think that way only 3 or 4 years later when that "toy" completely wiped out our 8-bit world.
- asplake 2y ago8” after 5.25” would have been a downgrade I think? I was glad to see the back of former (the latter too of course, but a bit later)
- simonblack 2y agoNope. Upgrade. I explained how the 8" held far more data than the 5". The HD 5" 1.2 MB didn't appear till the late 80s, early 90s. The 8" 1.2 MB was around about ten years earlier. 8" floppy (IBM-3470 SSSD format was the standard format for CP/M software to be distributed on.)
- lanna 2y agoYou got 5" and 8" mixed up
- simonblack 2y agoNope. CP/M software distribution standard floppy size was 8". (SSSD = IBM 3470 standard) I had gone from North Star DOS (5") floppy to CP/M (8").
- bryanlarsen 2y agoWhich likely puts you in your 40's. That's not old, only in tech is that old.
- biofox 2y agoI'm in my 30s, and my first computer as a kid had a 5.25" FDD. Fondest media-memory of that era was CD-ROMs coming in caddies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_%28hardware%29#/media/File:Cd_caddies_JPG.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_%28hardware%29#/media/Fi...
- pjmlp 2y agoI have seen them, during high school visit to our national TV in Portugal during early 90's. Our national post still had punched tape communications infrastructure on those days as well.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y agoDid it look like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzehb_yeZtU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzehb_yeZtU
- zafka 2y agoWhen I started at Siemens in Boca Raton, FL ( of course it was Broken Sound Blvd) There were a lot of older PBXs with 8" floppy drives. When they threw one out, they allowed me ( a co-op at the time) to take it home. I still have the floppy drive. I wish I had thought to get a few of the floppy disks for it.
- Ringz 2y agoIn Germany, there is a saying: „Das haben wir schon immer so gemacht. Das haben wir noch nie anders gemacht. Da könnte ja jeder kommen.“ In English, this roughly means: "We have always done it this way. We have never done it differently. Anyone could come along and say that." That explains a lot.
- throw_pm23 2y agoIn most cases, this attitude is a competitive advantage. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton's_fence https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton's_fence
- bogota 2y agoI would have a hard time believing that. I work with a company that hired a lot of germans and they have the worst developer experience onboarding and general infra of any place i have worked. When you outline why it’s bad and show how you would significantly speed up over 1000 engineers at the company with minimal work the answer is to leave it the same as is and “fix the issue” with some new process. Needless to say once my shares vest this year im gone. It is really such a bad environment to work in. I should note that the shares have been on a decade decline and i was brought in to fix these exact issues but no one at the company cares or puts in more than the bare minimum before clocking out for the day. I can’t fix an issue if people think it’s ok to spin up a new k8s instance for every single service, are ok spending a month after starting asking to be put in the right AD groups, and hand deploy almost everything.
- jiggawatts 2y agoThat’s the norm in most places. People are comfortable with rote, repetitive work like manual deployments. If you automate that away, then the only things left are the unique, unpredictable, and uncomfortable parts. People don’t like that and will actively resist. If you don’t have buy in and authority from senior management (CIO / CTO level), just give up. If you thought you did but you’re still unable to enact change then you need to go back to senior leadership with everything translated into dollars. Not “better” or “faster”! Has to be “cheaper”!
- dmkolobov 2y agoCan anyone speak to why those systems were considered more reliable? Are world agencies relying on this technology because of the inherent risk of rebuilding systems, or because of some attractive property of floppy disks?
- arcanemachiner 2y agoJust speculating here, but floppy disks can be wiped out by a magnet. Not exactly the most robust storage solution. So I would guess this is more about the friction of moving away from a legacy system, as opposed to the technological benefits of floppies.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoflash wipes itself out just sitting without power for as little as a year, and of course is made out of fantastically complex microscopic electronics. A floppy is ridiculously more robust than that, in the same way paper is even more robust than floppy. It actually takes a very very strong magnet in almost direct contact to alter a floppy.
- jiggawatts 2y agoI can tell you’ve either never used floppies, or used them so little that your opinion was formed more by luck than experience. Floppies are ridiculously unreliable. They were bad, even when they were brand new in a new drive. Failure rates of one in thirty or so wasn’t unusual. Installing large software packages was a gamble because disc 27 of 33 might have a bad sector and ruin your day. Floppies written with one drive often wouldn’t work in another. The drives themselves would often collect dust depending on how the fans inside the PC case were set up. The drive head would often wear out the floppies, especially if they were used daily (e.g.: boot discs). Keeping them in a hot car in summer could destroy them. I learned about forward error correction (FEC) in desperation when I was in my early teens because it was the only robust way to retain data on floppies for any length of time. There were a whole bunch of compression formats that could split your data so that any n-of-m floppies could be used to recover your data in case a few failed.
- leoh 2y agoMan, this would be fun to work on. Anyone know if they have any contracts open for bidding?
- jstummbillig 2y agoYou can find out here: https://www.evergabe-online.de/ https://www.evergabe-online.de/
- nvalis 2y agoHere is the direct link to the exact bidding: https://www.evergabe-online.de/tenderdetails.html?3&id=696469 https://www.evergabe-online.de/tenderdetails.html?3&id=69646...
- Havoc 2y agoUS missile silos have same
- trynumber9 2y agoMinuteman III retired 8" floppy disks 5 years ago. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy...
- mjevans 2y agoI wonder if there is a military grade chip equivalent to an Raspberry Pi? Or more ideally a RISC-V system that's similar. Replacement could begin by emulating the 8 inch floppy drive's electrical interface and attaching a modern system. The storage media should probably be some sort of flash memory rated for military use; I don't anticipate the size as an issue, nor most of the other specs. The most critical factor is selecting a storage media that's intended for production and support for the next 50 years, since it seems clear these systems will _never_ be updated again.
- cyco130 2y agoDear German Navy. I have built disk emulators before[1]. Please contact me if you need help :D [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/aspeqt https://sourceforge.net/projects/aspeqt. Better maintained fork: https://github.com/RespeQt/RespeQt https://github.com/RespeQt/RespeQt
- patrickmay 2y agoIn high school we had a couple of (old even back then) Wang PCs with 8" floppy disks. The jokes wrote themselves.
- smegsicle 2y agoi asked an ai to think of some jokes, and it came up with several categories of humor > Nostalgia and Size Jokes: "Why did the Wang computer refuse to go to the party? Because it was afraid of getting stuck in the crowd with its massive 8" floppy disks!" > Modern vs. Classic Tech: "Why did the Wang computer take up so much space? Because it couldn't fit in the tiny pockets of today's smartphones." > Cloud Storage Comparison: "Did you hear about the Wang computer trying to upload its files to the cloud? It kept saying, 'I'll just leave these here on the table, they're too big for the cloud!'" > Physical Strength Required: "Why did the Wang computer never go hiking? Because it couldn't handle carrying around those heavy 8" floppy disks." > Compatibility Issues: "Why didn't the Wang computer ever play hide and seek? Because its 8" floppy disks were always too obvious and easy to find." > Storage Capacity Humor: "Why did the Wang computer always carry a spare battery? Because its 8" floppy disks took forever to charge!"
- efa 2y agoComedians should have no fear of AI taking their jobs.
- rkagerer 2y agoJust upgrade to 3.5" ones and call it a day.
- layer8 2y agoThey don’t fit into the slots. ;)
- lifestyleguru 2y agoBetter not. The bid would be won by "totally not Russian" vendor.
- BjoernKW 2y agoIn Germany, long-established and entrenched processes and technologies are often confused with being reliable and safe. Fax machines are still widely used, particularly in public administration and larger organizations in general. The preposterous as well as appalling argument often heard in favour of this is that "fax is more secure than email" and somehow doesn't put privacy and the sacred German "data protection" at risk (because said data protection seemingly on applies to digital stuff). Famously - or rather notoriously, during the pandemic local German health authorities faxed case numbers and other relevant data to federal authorities, which led to massively delayed response times and a general unavailability of dependable, actionable data.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Calavar 2y agoFax is still widely used in the American healthcare system for the same reason. It's social reasoning rather than technical reasoning, combined with being excessively liability conscious and catering to the lowest common denominator. If you communicate confidential data by email, or really anything that's electronic and remotely accessible, it's only a matter of time until someone with poor judgment opens up their work laptop with confidential data plastered all over the screen while sitting in the middle seat on an airplane.
- BjoernKW 2y ago> On the other hand, a fax machine is usually located in an office that's only physically accessible to people with badge access. Well, again during the pandemic, the documentation of individual vaccinations in vaccination centres in Germany of course was done on reams of paper (because "more secure than digital" ...). That paper was then sent daily (via messenger, no less) to so-called "digitisation centres", where those piles of paper were scanned - and yes - turned into PDFs.
- ale42 2y ago> Famously - or rather notoriously, during the pandemic local German health authorities faxed case numbers and other relevant data to federal authorities, which led to massively delayed response times and a general unavailability of dependable, actionable data. Wasn't this in Switzerland? Or did it happen ALSO in Germany?
- mizzao 2y agoIf someone were to offer me $436 million to replace some 8 inch floppy disks, I could probably use $435 million of it to build some pretty interesting products that have nothing to do with floppy disks...
- lukan 2y agoThey didn't. It is a bit more than that. "The BAAINBw hired Saab for F123 updates. In July 2021, Saab announced winning a contract to "deliver and integrate new naval radars and fire control directors for and in the German Navy’s" F123s, with the work entailing "a new combat management system in order to completely overhaul the system currently in use on the F123, allowing a low risk integration of the new naval radars and fire control capabilities." The Swedish company said the deal was worth about 4.6 billion SEK (about $436,748,840)."
- sillywalk 2y agoIt looks like these ships were laid down in '92, and commissioned a few years later, which seems very late to use 8" floppies.
- mike_hearn 2y agoThey were on the way out but any equipment installed on a ship in the 90s would have been designed a lot earlier, and military equipment often lags due to long qualification times.
- fsh 2y agoWhat a weird thing to focus on. Even a modern warship is probably full of 74 series logic ICs which predate 8-inch floppies by several years. If the floppies did the job in 1994, why shouldn't they today? It's the same ship after all.
- Stevvo 2y agoIn 94 there were still companies in Germany making 8-inch floppies.
- jvlake 2y agoMakes sense. If I pick up an 8-inch or 5¼-inch and put it in a a maintained drive it WILL read it, try that with a writable CD/DVD. Don't get me started on the bit-rot you can expect from a 2024 NVMe