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

[Thepersona]

If you think US Gov is going to run Windows on these systems at any point in the future - it isn't going to happen.

Windows is a toy when it comes to reliability, even when stripped down to its basics.

at least for the navy they use (for some activities, like food administration if im correct) the DOS operating system

[Spray]

If you think US Gov is going to run Windows on these systems at any point in the future - it isn't going to happen.

Windows is a toy when it comes to reliability, even when stripped down to its basics.

Pretty much, no military system would ever run on any home-intended OSes. Completely different needs and security requirements.

I mean-- lots of military vehicles have their systems written in some pretty basic languages (Ada, for example) for at least two pretty good reasons - reliability and security through obscurity.

[Ulmita]

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.

I completely agree with you.

I started this thread for shit and giggles just to /poke some American posters from here and have some lols. However, i find it hilarious that some of them (cough Skroe, cough Kell) try to make the best of this comical fact.

There is no benefit what so ever trying to boot with multiple 8 inches diskettes a computer of the stone age that its frequency and ram are in double digits.
It might be able "to do the job" but if it crashes or needs rebooting when it is needed to work, you are fckd.

So the US uses simple reliable proven secure systems to handle our nuclear forces. And no, I wouldnt want to take your best home computer from you.

Simple sure, proven = lol.
Also, i am pretty sure you would need multiple of US armyman paychecks to be able to afford "my best computer" (no offense)

[Polyxo]

Pretty much, no military system would ever run on any home-intended OSes. Completely different needs and security requirements.

I mean-- lots of military vehicles have their systems written in some pretty basic languages (Ada, for example) for at least two pretty good reasons - reliability and security through obscurity.

Security through obfuscation is not something that's relied on for military usage, nor should it be.

[Ulmita]

Pretty much, no military system would ever run on any home-intended OSes. Completely different needs and security requirements.

I mean-- lots of military vehicles have their systems written in some pretty basic languages (Ada, for example) for at least two pretty good reasons - reliability and security through obscurity.

Those systems that you describe written in Ada etc, need to run on something else.
From my experience it will be either DOS, some-kind of a Linux kernel or a completely custom OS.

My money are on the first two (DOS or Linux)

[Polyxo]

I completely agree with you.

I started this thread for shit and giggles just to /poke some American posters from here and have some lols. However, i find it hilarious that some of them (cough Skroe, cough Kell) try to make the best of this comical fact.

There is no benefit what so ever trying to boot with multiple 8 inches diskettes a computer of the stone age that its frequency and ram are in double digits.
It might be able "to do the job" but if it crashes or needs rebooting when it is needed to work, you are fckd.



Simple sure, proven = lol.
Also, i am pretty sure you would need multiple of US armyman paychecks to be able to afford "my best computer" (no offense)

I don't think people realize how expensive and how difficult and how time consuming formal equivalency proofs are for software. A proofing app with a couple hundred gigs of ram can run for weeks proofing a relatively simple program. This is exactly why safety critical software remains on its language/chipset/system of original development.

Government software contracts are almost always the most stringent in requirements as well.

[Kellhound]

I completely agree with you.

I started this thread for shit and giggles just to /poke some American posters from here and have some lols. However, i find it hilarious that some of them (cough Skroe, cough Kell) try to make the best of this comical fact.

There is no benefit what so ever trying to boot with multiple 8 inches diskettes a computer of the stone age that its frequency and ram are in double digits.
It might be able "to do the job" but if it crashes or needs rebooting when it is needed to work, you are fckd.



Simple sure, proven = lol.
Also, i am pretty sure you would need multiple of US armyman paychecks to be able to afford "my best computer" (no offense)

Proven. They use it constantly.

I dont think Compaq 486DX computers are worth that much, even as collector items.

[OneSent]

I totally misread that title at first...

[May90]

I totally misread that title at first...

I see what you did there.

[hrugner]

So it's not an anti cylon measure?

[Skroe]

I completely agree with you.

I started this thread for shit and giggles just to /poke some American posters from here and have some lols. However, i find it hilarious that some of them (cough Skroe, cough Kell) try to make the best of this comical fact.

There is no benefit what so ever trying to boot with multiple 8 inches diskettes a computer of the stone age that its frequency and ram are in double digits.
It might be able "to do the job" but if it crashes or needs rebooting when it is needed to work, you are fckd.



Simple sure, proven = lol.
Also, i am pretty sure you would need multiple of US armyman paychecks to be able to afford "my best computer" (no offense)

The Space Shuttle flew every mission from 1990-2011 with the AP-101S CPU, which had a whipping 1 megabyte memory and operated at 1.2 million instructions per second. The most complex machine ever built by man and by far the the most powerful computers on board were the commercial off the shelf laptops stuck on board.

I mean this is kind of a facile argument isn't it? For all the potential high-tech solutions, of which the US employs many, the computers that RUN the world are comparatively primative and weak embedded systems. Everything above that is the top 1% as far as computing is concerned.

But the reason, as ringpriest said, the upgrade deployment wasn't rolled out was money. The branches do not love spending money on nuclear weapons and things involving nuclear weapons. Take the Air Force. The B-21, though it will be wired for the nuclear mission, won't be certified for it until well after 2030. THe F-35, if it's certified for nuclear delivery, the air force isn't rushing it. The Air Force's next ICBM, the replacement for the Minuteman III, sounds supiciously like the Peacekeeper MX, a missile they retired because it was expensive to own. The "New Air Launched Cruise Missile" sounds basically identical to the stealthy AGM-129 ACM they retired a few years back in favor of keeping the older (but also partially conventional and far cheaper to own) AGM-86 ALCM.

Consider the Navy. Currently they are building 2 Virginia class attack subs per year. They would very much like to boost that to 3. However when the Ohio Replacement Program starts construction around 2021, the build rate will shift to 1 ORP and 1 Virginia. So whats the navy doing? Trying to get the ORP moved to a "National Deterrence Fund", outside the normal shipbuilding budget, so they can keep building at least two Virginias. This is what the US did in the 1980s when it built 2 Ohios and 2-3 Los Angeles class subs per year. It will almost certainly happen again, now that Obama won't be there to veto it.

To put it another way, the Navy is HAPPY to perform the nuclear mission, so long as it doesn't impinge on the conventional warfighting mission.

But that said, if you even suggest to the Air Force that the land based ballistic missile deterrent be retired in favor of an all SLBM-force, they'll completely lose their shit.

It always comes down to priorities, and nuclear hasn't been top of the pile in years.

[Duravian]

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I'm a 32 year old millennial, and I totally used these as a kid:

Idk about 8 inches, but when I was a wee lad in the 90s it took me 4 floppy disks of some size just to load up Doom. But it was so, so... so worth the wait.

[Skroe]

I'm often critical of what I see as gross flaws or failings in the US military, but this one I'm just going to call bullshit on; The Guardian is basically prevaricating here - they're grossly misrepresenting reality so they can sell a particular spin on it (and doing themselves and their credibility a disservice in the process). Yes, elements are US strategic (nuclear) command, co-ordination, and control use some really old hardware; but the Guardian spins this to pretend that nothing has changed since the mid-70s when those elements were first introduced and that is in no way true.

The system that SACCS replaced (which also, confusingly had the same acronym for a slightly different name) had its first elements introduced in the late 1940s and was "completed" in the late 60s. SACCS itself had its first elements introduced in the mid-70s, and was fully operational in 1990. And since then newer systems have been developed, implemented, and deployed (and in some cases retired) - there are hosts of more modern systems providing redundant functionality around, on top of and beside the old crap, including systems specifically designed to resist jamming and the Air Forces' SATCOM network.

Work on the next-gen complete replacement really got rolling a few years back, after Obama's 2nd term got started, and it'll probably be finished and rolled out to fully replace SACCS in another 10-20 years (assuming the US is still around). In an ideal world, that would have started about 10 years ago, and be rolling over in 5-10, but that stupid War on Terror thing blew a lot of budget that could have been far, far better spent (and is I suspect the reason stuff has gone past what was likely its original retirement date).


And that's on top of the fact that there are good and solid reasons for using older tech that works, which other posters have pointed out and the Guardian was either negligently or deliberately ignorant of, and the fact that this sort of thing is prevalent in multiple industries, from power to transport to communication and beyond; there was probably a good story about aging infrastructure kept on for various reasons (not all good by any means), but instead we got this crap. It pisses me off because its the same bullshit the "omg, terrorists, the sky is falling" crowd pulls, only directed inward instead of outward - there are plenty of real issues to criticize the US, its military, and even our nuclear arsenal in particular on, but this is not one of them.

The Guardian... prevaricating...? Is there a newspaper in the Western world that is more Agenda driven than the Guardian? For fucks sake their editor for years was Seamus Milne, who is actually a completely pathological nutjob, currentlythe Labour Party's Executive Director of Strategy and Communications and considered the brains beyond Jeremy Corbyn, someone only somewhat less completely out of his fucking mind.

When it comes to the US Military, the Guardian has two modes: completely fucking incompetent or The Borg.

Oh and by the way, the Guardian's National Security editor? Spencer Ackerman, who in his previous life ran Danger Room with David Axe, where they spent the better part of a decade systematically assaulting the "too advanced, uneeded, expensive" F-22. At least Ackerman's current gig has cooled off his role in the Second Fighter Crusade (against the F-35, where David Axe's works of fiction continue).

But you know this. National Security publications have some seriously questionable people behind articles written compared to many other forms of journalism. Everyone has a goddamn agenda.

If you ever want a reminder there are truly sick bastards in the world, that make OT here look like a petting zoo, go read CiF. It's a trip.

[twelvethirty]

probably the only piece of us government hardware that isn't compromised

[caervek]

I have a 80486 with a 8'' which is what i will be donating to the USAF if needed

Are you sure it's not a 5.25"? The 8" drives became obsolete over a decade before the 80486 hit the scene.

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I'm 24 and I can vividly remember using 1.44MB floppy "A-type" (default letter of this drive in Windows) diskettes (3 1/2 inch ones). I know "B ones" (the bigger ones) only because my Dad used to show me those, but we weren't using them anymore.

Sorry for being pedantic, but A: and B: simply related to the first and second FDD connected to the system, they could be 8"/5.25"/3.5" drives of any capacity.

[skannerz22]

If the US is using those, what do you think Russia is using? Flint and steel?

1930s with the data stored on site and they connect them via a cable

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1970s computer with 8bit floppy disks

you know what that means right?
that all the movies and tv shows about nukes being stolen by hackers using hightech usb or virus is a load of shit

1970s computer using floppy disk is technically unhackable from off site
you would need an exact copy of the 8bit floppy original to "hack" the computer and for you to have the original 8bit floppy..it's pointless making a copy unless you plan to go in undetected at a different time
anything made beyond 1990s is very likely not compatible with any hightech or internet made virus

[Deleted]

If the US is using those, what do you think Russia is using? Flint and steel?

DVDs .

[Ausr]

I completely agree with you.

I started this thread for shit and giggles just to /poke some American posters from here and have some lols. However, i find it hilarious that some of them (cough Skroe, cough Kell) try to make the best of this comical fact.

There is no benefit what so ever trying to boot with multiple 8 inches diskettes a computer of the stone age that its frequency and ram are in double digits.
It might be able "to do the job" but if it crashes or needs rebooting when it is needed to work, you are fckd.



Simple sure, proven = lol.
Also, i am pretty sure you would need multiple of US armyman paychecks to be able to afford "my best computer" (no offense)

Helps if you quote the whole article, which Gabriel pointed out. Like usual, we laugh at you.

[Noradin]

Why would they use something else?
Do you want them to switch to win10 or something? Preferably with internet connection for automated updates?

[zmp]

Well, alot of terminals and mainframes today are still running with legacy code written in Cobol. Nobody want to fix or replace something that already works.