Military uses floppy disks to coordinate nuclear forces

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U.S. military uses 70s-era computers with floppy disks to coordinate nuclear forces. Not. Exactly. Reassuring.

J.P. Travis: Born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1976 graduate of University of Michigan, father, grandfather, husband, founder and CEO of Travelyn Publishing (http://www.travelynpublishing.com/), and passionate anti-government believer in individual liberty.

View Comments (28)

  • This could explain the VA SNAFU. They're using vintage 1979 IBM PCs to set appointments and verify benefit eligibility.

  • I asked a guy who works in the field about this at one point. The reason is that modern computers are orders of magnitude more complicated than the 1970's stuff. That means they require that much more testing to certify. We spent years perfecting the hardware and software behind our current nuclear arsenal to the point where we were absolutely sure it would work on demand. It would take a decade or more to get a suitable alternative in place, and it wouldn't give any significant improvement in performance.

  • For all I know the old computers may be less vulnerable to cyber attack. So I dunno what I think about this- could be good, could be bad.

    • One of my favorite movies of all time: Independence Day.

      Morse code. The high tech bad guy aliens didn't know what it was. I'd say there's a pretty good chance even the Chinese won't remember what a floppy disc is. Maybe even the lost Amazon tribes won't remember. I say let's give it a go!!

      • That's like the U.S. using Navahos to communicate during WWII, while the Japanese were pulling their hair out trying to figure out the "code."

    • But do you remember how slow the computers were reading those floppies? I'd hate to think someone is waiting for a floppy to load while Chinese ICBMs are headed toward us.

      • Pretty sure "launch on warning" is no longer a DOD nuclear strategy, so it doesn't matter if the Chinese ICBMs take out most of the ground based deterrent, they'd be plastered by the subs and B-2s.

  • My first real PC was a KAYPRO 4 (hhad a Commodore 4 before for basic programming). At that time the small engineering company I worked at still had 8 inch floppys. However, just two years before my college still used card readers and tape, along with FORTRAN, for their computing system, which was the size of a lecture hall.

    • I remember walking into the computer center with my two boxes of punched cards--I think I had graduated from Fortran to COBOL--for my millionth debugging effort, when another guy walking in with an equally large program tripped on the steps and dropped his two boxes. One of the boxes sprang open, and cards flew all over in the wind and snow. He just looked at the mess for a moment, gave the unopened box a healthy kick, scattering a few hundred more cards into the wind, and calmly said, "Obviously I'll be dropping this class tomorrow." Who knows, he might have invented Facebook or the iPhone if he hadn't dropped his cards that evening. As it is, he probably ended up with a degree in French Lit. Punch cards were an awfully primitive way to program.

      • Yeah, Actually was WATFIV and I used those miserable IBM card punchers. Many time you got one card out of order, waited an hour and found out you had garbage. Or you type in 90 characters on the card and make a mistake, whole card is scrap. It sucked.

        Kids have no idea how easy programming is today or 30 years ago. However, it did make you think ahead which was probably very good for later life.

        • Yes, you were encouraged by the difficulty of the process to think of ways and procedures that would shorten the program. Something the programming-by-committee crowd at Microsoft has never learned. I don't know how they do things at MS but I SUSPECT they never fix anything. Instead, when they have a problem they write NEW code to fix the outcome rather than searching out and fixing the bad code that created the problem in the first place.

          • they write NEW code to fix the outcome rather than searching out and fixing the bad code

            That's why they used to call it a "Security Patch". Now they call it an update.

  • Yet there are people that wonder why the government is so inefficient and takes so long to process information.

    But hey, we spent plenty of $$$ to save some some desert turtles and subsidize failed "green" energy projects so it's all good.

  • But the good news is the people who run these computers can pee in the bathroom of their choice...we are sooooooooooooooo F*cked....

  • They've spent hundreds of billions on the F-35 which still doesn't fly, but they couldn't walk down to Best Buy and get a new PC? Seriously? My cellphone has more computer power than a 70s-era IBM mainframe.

    • On the other hand if Hillary is any example of the state of our network security maybe it is a good thing they rely on these dinosaurs!