No really, looky here. As someone in the article asks, “I don’t even know where they buy these things.”
Question. Is it possible that the Defense Department has an exclusive contract with one or two companies to supply 8-inch floppy disks today?
The cost, effort and disruption of migration to something new often appears to weigh heavily against the cost and effort of just keeping the damn thing going a little bit longer - and it’s surprising how that very short-term view can lead to such long-term behaviours, but it happens.
It’s made worse by the fact that the longer this situation persists, the broader (=more difficult and costly to cross) becomes the gulf between where we are and where we ought to be.
I work in IT (not for the government at the moment) and I am maintaining and attempting to support a system based on a database technology that is exactly the same age as I am (and I have grey hairs in my beard).
We should change it, and I would dearly love to change it, but as long as it works, the expense of changing it is unpalatable. If I let it fail, it’s my failure, not the system’s failure.
(I’ve actually been told from the top level that we are not going to change it, but we will just understand and work within its limitations. This is an ‘OK’ idea, but any time we actually hit one of those limitations, it’s unacceptable, and we need to expend huge effort on workarounds. I need to deliver change without changing anything. Bah.)
Mangetout: I’ve been there! Every year, I used to beg my supervisors to let me dump and reload the database, to defragment it. It would improve performance, and free up disk space. The vendors told us we were in violation of our maintenance agreement because we weren’t taking proper care of the installation. But every year, I was told no. They didn’t want to lose a week’s productivity.
“It hasn’t crashed yet, has it?” they would say.
I wonder if they take the same attitude toward oil-changes in their own cars…
Rare photograph of Mangetout at work
When I joined RH in 2000 I almost squeed at the antiquated computer systems. The monitors were in color, the databases were not. That same year, the company started a project to update its management software, moving to a single system any and every thing which could reasonably be moved into it.
My 2014-15 project involved as its “legacy systems” several of the same ones we’d removed from RH. It took the end users a while to understand that I actually knew their systems as well as they did 
this. if you’ve bought anything of moderate- to high-price from a large company, or have shipped anything domestically or internationally, it’s been done through mainframes. The company I work for does everything on the mainframes they’ve used for decades. Engineering releases, logistics, production scheduling, even my time card requires me to open a 3270 emulator.
Why? because it works. And because replacing it would be incredibly expensive and effectively require shutting the entire company down. And because everyone knows transitioning to that “new & shiny” system that is supposedly “so much better” than that antiquated 1970s stuff won’t go smoothly, so you can plan on the company being shut down for at least three times as long as planned, and the transition cost to be at least quadruple what was planned.
Many times, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the right answer. messing with things turns it into “if it ain’t broke, fix it until it is.”
so when I see these “news” stories about how the systems controlling our nuclear missiles using floppy disks (oh, the horror) I go “so what?” That system has one job to do, and that is “make pointy boomstick go to sky.”
Mangetout? That guy looks more like a Mangerien…
I got yer 8 inches right here! It ain’t too floppy, though.
From a story about this on ABC news: "“We’re taking kids graduating with degrees in information technology and dumbing them down so they can learn what they were doing back in 1960,” Chaffetz said. "
Hey, maybe these systems are so outdated and obscure that hackers would have profound difficulty with them - a security advantage.
There must still be a market for this stuff. No business, even the government, is going through the expense of replacing old tech as long as it still works. Go inside a modern telecommunications center and you will see machines from the 80’s buzzing along happily right next to modern systems. As long as it still works, it is cheaper to maintain than replace.
Damn, I wish I’d known about this. We’ve been clearing out stuff in preparation for our Big Move, and some of what got tossed was old floppy disks from the '90s. Bet I could have sold them to the military for $1000 each.
A true story about computers and government regulations.
I worked in a government agency. While I had an official office, I more frequently used an unofficial office. I wanted to get a computer in my unofficial office. One of my co-workers also worked part time at a computer shop and could hook us up with a decent slightly-outdated used computer for around fifty dollars, which would be fine for what we would use it for.
The problem was all electronic devices were highly regulated. They had to all be registered on a central index. Adding a new computer to the index and getting it registered would have been virtually impossible, even if I paid for it myself.
And they would periodically check. They had auditors come through the entire facility and look at each electronic device. They wanted to see the sticker with its registration number. They would then look up the registration number and confirm that device belonged in that location. Having an unauthorized device could be a serious issue.
But we had an old storage building and it was full of old equipment, which was either horribly outdated or didn’t work. But all this old equipment was technically registered.
Some I asked some of the powers-that-be if I could take one of the old computers from storage and put it in my unofficial office. They said “You can but you know those are really old computers and most of them don’t even work.” I said “Well, okay, can I take one of those old computers that isn’t working and fix it by replacing some of its parts and then use it?” And they agreed I could.
So I went down to storage and dug up an old computer, which I had registered as being located in my unofficial office. I then removed its registration sticker. I then “fixed” it by “replacing” some parts - I threw out the old computer and brought in the new computer (nobody said I couldn’t replace 100% of the parts), I attached the old registration sticker to the new computer and as far as the index was concerned this new computer was now the old computer, even though the only part from the old computer that was still present was the sticker itself. But any auditor who checked would see that this old computer was registered to be in my office.
The USAF uses 8" floppies on a system that coordinates our nuclear weapons, among other things.
One benefit is that it’s so old that it’s extremely hard to hack and break into.
This is freaking BRILLIANT!
I interview for a state agency. An engineer explained to me that they bought spare parts and stored them in these handy metal boxes, like the one on his desk.
Just think of all the money and frustration they have saved not having to constantly upgrade, reboot, and reprogram this and that because the upgrade breaks everything!
Perhaps they are smarter than you and I?
In the Nineties, I worked for a membership organization which relied on a mainframe from the Seventies and accessed by dumb terminals that may have been even older. These things were not encased in plastic but wood!
:eek:
"Moscow. We wanted to rain down on Moscow not Munchen.
Apropos:
This reminds me of my college days in the mid/late 90’s. One of my roommates’ fathers worked in IT and was involved in Y2K updates to the nuclear power plant near us.
One of their other projects: Upgrading the computers to no longer require paper punched-tape inputs.