#Fail: US Still Runs It’s Nukes On Floppy Disks

Without giving my age away, I grew up in a time where I was storing programs and documents on 5.25″ floppy disks. Those held either 360K or 1.2 MB. They were truly floppy and were easy to damage if you weren’t careful. So when the 3.5″ disk came along which was more robust and happened to store 1.44 MB of data, that was amazing to me. Now I haven’t seen a floppy disk of any sort since the mid 1990’s, which is why I was floored to find out that the USA who has a rather substantial nuclear arsenal, still runs that operation on 8″ floppy disks according to a new report that was done by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Wow.

Keep in mind that 8″ floppy disks were pretty much dead when I started using computers in the late 1970’s. But the good news is that by the end of 2017, these systems will be replaced with ones that don’t rely on 8″ Floppy disks. But you have to shake your head at the use of such ancient technology for such an important purpose.

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