Floppy disks; and yet there are still. It may sound strange but a new report revealed that large parts of America's nuclear arsenal still use 1970 computer control systems using eight-inch disks.
According to a report by US Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Department of Defense (DOD), "coordinates the operational operations of US nuclear forces, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear bombers," using prehistoric computer systems.
The same report explained that American taxpayers spend around $61 billion annually to maintain technologies due to agings (see floppy disks), an amount that is about three times more than the government would spend if it used new systems.
"This system παραμένει σε χρήση, διότι, εν ολίγοις, εξακολουθεί να λειτουργεί,” δήλωσε η εκπρόσωπος του πενταγώνου Πεντάγωνο Valerie Henderson told the AFP news agency.
But let's look at exactly what eight-inch floppy disks mean. They have a capacity of 237.25KB, which is enough to store about 15 seconds of audio. If we were to compare it to a cheap 32GB memory card, we would need over 130.000 floppy disks to have the same storage capacity.
The fact may sound fun, but we were putting one floppy disk on top of the other, we would build a tower 200 meters high!
These floppy disks keep the Americans safe at night.
The US Department of Defense, however, stated that it intends to modernize their systems. “Floppy drives are scheduled to be replaced with secure digital ones Appliances until the end of 2017," said Henderson.
The report also reported that the Pentagon plans to replace the system completely by the end of 2020. But there are some systems that support America's extensive government machine.
To the Treasury, let's say most of the data for individual taxpayers and tax leakage runs in a programming language that only works on very old IBM large computers.
TNW
