US nuclear arsenal controlled by 1970s computers with 8in floppy disks

[PACOX]

On a serious note, aren't nuclear weapons purposely limited?

Considering what we've accomplished in ballistics, rocketry, and weapons systems, nukes could be 100x more devastating than what they currently are. Be glad we're not allowed the weaponize space, though that might accelerate our space technology like Cold War did in the past.

[Reeve]

I have a hard time applying the "millennial" label to anyone who actually knows the joys of having to rewind a VHS.

Be kind, please rewind.

Basically anyone who can remember blowing into a Nintendo cartridge onwards is technically a millennial.

[unbound]

The federal government always had issues updating legacy system/technology this is no secret. Currently I am working on a legacy system called MOCAS to keep track of large assets (i.e. Fighter planes and so on) and it was developed in 1984 When dod had to update Windows xp to 7. we had to do it in stages and even then that ended up being a nightmare of trying to integrate all the legacy systems together. Personally during that transition I couldn't hardly do anything at work because of all the system issues with that whole transition alone

Simply put upgrading technology at the government level is a logistics nightmare so for most systems it comes down to if its not broke don't try to fix it because if you try you will break not only your system but everything attached to it

Commercial businesses aren't much different. If you look at the screens of most car dealership service schedulers, many are still DOS running on Windows.

[Rixis]

Be kind, please rewind.

Basically anyone who can remember blowing into a Nintendo cartridge onwards is technically a millennial.

Which was bad for the cart

It feels wrong being bunched with Millenials, it's far far far too broad a range.

[Reeve]

Which was bad for the cart

It feels wrong being bunched with Millenials, it's far far far too broad a range.

Yeah, my father was, among many many other things, an electrical engineer and he explained in no uncertain terms that I shouldn't blow in the cartridges. I generally didn't, but my friends sure did.

And yeah, I always thought it was unfair that I'm considered the same generation as people who were still wearing diapers when 9/11 happened. That I'm in the same generation as people who have twitter and snapchat on their smart phones in middle school. None of that was part of my reality in my formative years. And I never knew the joy of writing a school report based on Wikipedia. World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica, baby! Also Encarta.

[s_bushido]

Basically anyone who can remember blowing into a Nintendo cartridge onwards is technically a millennial.

Yeah, technically... But it just feels like there's too big a difference between kids who grew up with NES and VHS and kids who grew up with the internet. Just one of those personal hang-ups I have about pointless topics, I guess.

[Rixis]

On their phone. I didn't get a phone of any kind until I was about 16. Green screen, not even sure if it had snake on it.

If you moved house to another town (even only 5 mile away), you might as well have pretended your friends didn't exist, as you'd never see them again

[Reeve]

Yeah, technically... But it just feels like there's too big a difference between kids who grew up with NES and VHS and kids who grew up with the internet. Just one of those personal hang-ups I have about pointless topics, I guess.

This is what my TV looked like as a kid:

[Puupi]

Yeah, my father was, among many many other things, an electrical engineer and he explained in no uncertain terms that I shouldn't blow in the cartridges. I generally didn't, but my friends sure did.

And yeah, I always thought it was unfair that I'm considered the same generation as people who were still wearing diapers when 9/11 happened. That I'm in the same generation as people who have twitter and snapchat on their smart phones in middle school. None of that was part of my reality in my formative years. And I never knew the joy of writing a school report based on Wikipedia. World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica, baby! Also Encarta.

Luckily we don't use any generation term thingies here. I would be furious if someone painted me with the same brush as these youngsters today.

[Deleted]

I have seen some pretty darn old machines and operating systems for them still being in use, but this has to take the cake

[Reeve]

Luckily we don't use any generation term thingies here. I would be furious if someone painted me with the same brush as these youngsters today.

Well the advantage is that I can say unequivocally that I'm the most senior milennial in my company.

[Polyxo]

I'm a CS major currently working on hardware integration for security software. One of my professors also works largely for government agencies in updating software. In safety critical software, in order to update anything at all, from a main execution sequence to the simplest getters and setters, most government agencies require mathematical/logical proof of equivalence at every scope for every single piece of code. This is the main reason why so many systems are not updated from their original technology. You not only need to write new important technology, but then you need to exhaustively and redundantly prove that every single level of the software is an exact duplicate in function to the previous set of software.

It's a phenomenally slow process, and it's expensive. That's why it hasn't been done very much, and it's taking forever.

[apepi]

Maybe they can update their computers to Windows ME!

[xact4]

This is what my TV looked like as a kid:

woah woah WOAH. that is the exact TV we had when i was a kid. had a nintendo rigged up to it and everything. Small world

[Reeve]

woah woah WOAH. that is the exact TV we had when i was a kid. had a nintendo rigged up to it and everything. Small world

The screen went all funny colors when I put my favorite bar magnet up to it!

[Masark]

It feels wrong being bunched with Millenials, it's far far far too broad a range.

"Boomers" and "Gen Xers" are similarly broad ranges.

And yeah, I always thought it was unfair that I'm considered the same generation as people who were still wearing diapers when 9/11 happened.

As opposed to members of the Silent Generation who were fighting in WW2 while the younger members of their generation were still in diapers?

Or Boomers who were in Vietnam when the younger members of their generation were just starting kindergarten?

[Reeve]

"Boomers" and "Gen Xers" are similarly broad ranges.



As opposed to members of the Silent Generation who were fighting in WW2 while the younger members of their generation were still in diapers?

Or Boomers who were in Vietnam when the younger members of their generation were just starting kindergarten?

Yeah, I feel like if we're going to break up generations based on how to market to them (which is how these divisions are conceived), then the difference between a generation that grew up with social media and omnipresent well developed internet is extremely different from one that grew up in the 80s.

And yes, I'd say that from a product marketing perspective, that's a bigger difference than that between the Silent Generation members who fought WW2 and those like my grandfather who fought in the Korean War instead.

[Theinquisition]

I'd be shocked if any of you had an 8 inch floppy. You're probably confusing them with the 5.25. 8 inch was phased out in the late 70s and even the commodore 64 used a 5.25. So good luck even finding an 8 inch reader, let alone the media. And even better luck trying to connect it to a modern PC.

P.S. Calling someone a millenial who was born in the early 80s and was a legal adult before the new millenium is fucking retarded. I was born in 82 and still remember using a rotary phone to call friends and dialing into early 1990s prodigy/AOL with a 2400 bps modem. Comparing me with someone who's first real game console was a PS2 is retarded.

remember having to watch VHS porn?

Boy do I feel old.

[Reeve]

remember having to watch VHS porn?

Boy do I feel old.

I'll admit I don't think I ever watched VHS porn. Seems like it's suck to pause and get that staticky image that flickered around.

[Skroe]

On a serious note, aren't nuclear weapons purposely limited?

Considering what we've accomplished in ballistics, rocketry, and weapons systems, nukes could be 100x more devastating than what they currently are. Be glad we're not allowed the weaponize space, though that might accelerate our space technology like Cold War did in the past.

Not really. It's just that popular culture has given people a wrong impression of what nuclear weapons do and what they're for.

Early Thermonuclear weapon yields were large (the design being highly scalble) because they were inaccurate, on the order of 1.6-3km CEP. A big bomber or an early ballistic missile would drop / launch them with the hope that they would get close to the target. The size was driven by the fact that if you miss the target by the full 3km, lets say the silos or a base of the other side, you're actually missing by quite a lot. So weapons were made humongous in order to make "missing" less of a catastrophe. Missing by 3km is no big deal when the destruction radius is 6km, essentially.


Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, ICBMs got better (the US and Russia RAPIDLY iterated through missile designs) and warheads got more accurate. Yields, generally speaking went down, because it became more desirable to put more, smaller re-entry vehicles (what we call warheads in everyday talk, but the warhead is really inside the RV) on top of missiles.


The truth is that neither Russia, nor the United States, is terribly interested in killing large numbers of the other sides civilians. Most nuclear weapons are targeted at the other side's defense infrastructure. Yes, Russia nuking Tampa to destroy Central Command will kill a lot of American civilians, but that's because that is where Central Command is, not because they want to kill the people of Tampa. Moreover every warhead aimed at 'value' targets (cities) is one not aimed at the other side's silos or C4ISR infrastructure, and due to treaty limits on warheads, every warhead counts. Even at 400kt yield, far bigger than Hiroshima's 18kt, it would take a few warheads to destroy a city the size of New York. Modern cities are simply much bigger than 1940s cities, and construction is a lot better and sturdier. A warhead striking Brooklyn would cause thermal damage to midtown Manhattan, but it wouldn't flatten the city.


It's hard to beat something like a Trident II D5 that is fully MIRV'd. It has a big warhead - the W88 at 455kt. It is highly accurate (5m-90m CEP) with GPS. It's undetectable (being sub launched). Maybe you could replace the Re-entry vehicles with hypersonic gliders so they can maneuver and follow non-ballistic trajectories, but Russia and China don't have missile defense systems requiring that. They're pretty much the most evolved form possible of that concept which is why they'll be around for 40 more years. You could make them cheaper to own and easier to maintain maybe, but "bigger" or "better" is a rather hard thing to picture.

The one nuclear weapon system never deployed were orbital bombardment systems. Basically a big space rocket, like eht Delta IV heavy (at the time, the Russians thought that Saturn V may be this) would go into Low Earth Orbit with Re-entry vehicles, that would deorbit to hit their targets. It would be impossible to defend against, and something the size of the Saturn V could carry about 300 of the 308kg W-88s. It's unlikey such a weapon would ever seriously be deployed. It would also be hugely expensive.

So I wouldn't say "purposely limited" other than limited by money. The Peacekeeper MX missile was far more capable and much newer than the Minuteman III. But it was retired a few years ago while the Minuteman III will serve for 20 more years. Why? Because the Peacekeeper MX was much more expensive to own than Minuteman III, which is cheap, and the less recurrent costs you spend on nuclear weapons, the more you have to spend on conventional forces. So always consider that #1: the DoD just doesn't love spending money on these things. A single Trident II D5 is a $50 million investment. A routine test of a Trident II D5, just to make sure that all the parts can be certified as working if needed, is a $70 million exercise.

In the end it's all about money. Even the B-21 bomber, though designed with nuclear bombing in mind, won't be declared "nuclear capable" until sometime later. Why? Because the Air Force doesn't want to spend the money on it until after 2030.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm a CS major currently working on hardware integration for security software. One of my professors also works largely for government agencies in updating software. In safety critical software, in order to update anything at all, from a main execution sequence to the simplest getters and setters, most government agencies require mathematical/logical proof of equivalence at every scope for every single piece of code. This is the main reason why so many systems are not updated from their original technology. You not only need to write new important technology, but then you need to exhaustively and redundantly prove that every single level of the software is an exact duplicate in function to the previous set of software.

It's a phenomenally slow process, and it's expensive. That's why it hasn't been done very much, and it's taking forever.

Ding ding ding. We have a winner.