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The Military Security Technology

Air Force Finally Retires 8-Inch Floppies From Missile Launch Control System (arstechnica.com) 77

Posted by BeauHD from the old-vs-new dept.
Five years after CBS publicized the fact that the Air Force still used eight-inch floppy disks to store data critical to operating the Air Force's intercontinental ballistic missile command, the aerial and space warfare service branch decided it was time to officially retire them. Ars Technica reports: The system, once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), relied on IBM Series/1 computers installed by the Air Force at Minuteman II missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the contention by the Air Force at the time of the 60 Minutes report that the archaic hardware offered a cybersecurity advantage, the service has completed an upgrade to what is now known as the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS), as Defense News reports. SAACS is an upgrade that swaps the floppy disk system for what Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force's 595th Strategic Communications Squadron, described as a "highly secure solid state digital storage solution." The floppy drives were fully retired in June.

But the IBM Series/1 computers remain, in part because of their reliability and security. And it's not clear whether other upgrades to "modernize" the system have been completed. Air Force officials have acknowledged network upgrades that have enhanced the speed and capacity of SACCS' communications systems, and a Government Accountability Office report in 2016 noted that the Air Force planned to "update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017." But it's not clear how much of that has been completed.
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Air Force Finally Retires 8-Inch Floppies From Missile Launch Control System More

Air Force Finally Retires 8-Inch Floppies From Missile Launch Control System

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  • Probable translation: pendrive with a hardware read-only switch. Certainly, this would be an improvement, but it is scarcely worth getting too excited about something available in the consumer market for decades.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kremmy ( 793693 )
      They're literally saying SD (Secure solid state Digital) card...

    • Nope, it is a 5.25" double-sided diskette.

      Next up in 35 years: 3.5" DS double density floppies with the hard case.

      • It takes 35 years to unearth all of the backdoors and potential vulnerabilities in more modern hardware.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xonen ( 774419 )

        Nope, it is a 5.25" double-sided diskette.

        Next up in 35 years: 3.5" DS double density floppies with the hard case.

        I'm not seeing the issue with that.

        My Commodore 64 still works and can read it's 5.25" floppy disks. Any PC i had after is by long gone to the scrapyard, and any surviving hardware from the 90's era is prone for defects or faulty behavior. Hardware from past 2000 even worse, it is as if the newer the hardware, the shorter it's lifespan.

        Anything new and shiny you install today will be totally outdated in 5-10 years and possibly irreplaceable as well. Might as well stick to those 8" floppies. They don't have

        • Obviously you're not using one of the 1541 drives as those died very quickly.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by drnb ( 2434720 )

            Obviously you're not using one of the 1541 drives as those died very quickly.

            Pretty safe assumption he's using of the 1541s that just kept working. An individual piece of electronics tends to die early or last forever, given good environmental conditions. Mine was about 5 years old when it found a new home.

            • You're describing what is sometimes called "the bathtub curve", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . While useful, it's accuracy for new hardware is very limited by occasional catastrophic failures caused by a a single component that consistently fails early, a flaw often shared by the entire product line or only shared by those made for a few months.

              I

              • While useful, it's accuracy for new hardware is very limited by occasional catastrophic failures caused by a a single component that consistently fails early,

                The book-case typical example of "single component that consistently fails early" is the capacitor. Most of the 1970 era hardware such as those 8" floppies and the big iron used to read them pre-dates those.

                Most moderne-day or just recent hardware isn't affected by them anymore. (Exemple of more recent "consistent failure": crappy lithium batteries which a high propension to explosions, horrendously craptastic low-quality component from fly-by-night no-name asian brands. These are real "consistent failure"

          • > Obviously you're not using one of the 1541 drives as those died very quickly.

            Not in my experience. I was able to load software from 20 year old floppies on my C64. Not every disk, but enough to refute your claim (at least in my experience). Proper storage is a factor.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Geekbot ( 641878 )

              1 in 1,000 people refute the claim that 99.9% of 1541 drives failed rapidly. News at 11.

              • 1541 drives didn't break, they just got misaligned.
                Commodore cut costs so much that they didn't put a limit sensor on the drive.
                In order to set the home position you just stepped 40 or so times toward track 0. If you were already at track zero it banged the head against the stop 40 times. Not great for keeping things aligned.

            • Yeah, my 1541 is still working perfectly.
              eBay has working ones for sale all the time.

        • If you want something built properly, build it in the Sixties.

          • If you want something built properly, build it in the Sixties

            I hope I make it another 41 yeas so I can get quality stuff again. I still have my Fisher receiver and speakers from the late 1960s that still work.

        • Nope, it is a 5.25" double-sided diskette.
          Next up in 35 years: 3.5" DS double density floppies with the hard case.

          I'm not seeing the issue with that.
          My Commodore 64 still works and can read it's 5.25" floppy disks.

          8" floppies have the best areal density of any floppy, where best is defined by reliability. Bits are just bigger and stronger on an eight incher. The 5.25" DD floppy was the second-best. It all goes downhill from there, as the floppies get smaller.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by guruevi ( 827432 )

            The only reason things got smaller is because tolerances during manufacturing got smaller. 8" floppy drives were pretty unreliable from machine to machine as the alignment wasn't always the same so your drive would read different bits for the same tracks. That largely went away with 3.5 but you still had the issue of physical mylar touching the heads, over time things wear out and you get a white streak on the drives where it has slowly stripped off the magnetic layer.

            Bit error rates for floppies wouldn't w

      • "highly secure solid state digital storage solution."

        My guess is an 80-col punched card.

        What? It's solid, it's digital, will last a lot longer than any HDD. Just don't get it wet...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dwywit ( 1109409 )

      Like someone on another website said - communicating with a USB controller is probably beyond the capability of a Series/1

      For a start, the Series/1 is a 16-bit computer. And it's probably EBCDIC .Got any compatible 16-bit USB drivers handy?

      • The most immediately obvious solution to going with an SD card or USB thumb drive is to use a microcontroller based custom adapter to mimic the old floppy drive unit. This is the solution I now use for some old 8086 based computers running ancient manufacturing equipment where the floppy units quit working long ago.

        • "The most immediately obvious solution to going with an SD card or USB thumb drive..."

          Are you crazy? They'll use the next technology, 5 1/4 inch floppies, they still have tons of these.

      • Spoon Feed (Score:4, Interesting)

        by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Saturday October 19, 2019 @07:59AM (#59324798)

        There are ISA cards that accept SD Cards and spoon-feed the data into the bus through a microcontroller. Crap, there are disk emulators for Commodore 64's and Atari ST's that do the same thing. The fancy ones have USB ports so you can mount the SD card on your desktop without swapping cards.

        If the base system is well documented enough (and IBM is famous for it's extensive documentation) then interfacing it with any arbitrary thing isn't that difficult, especially with readily available microcontrollers that are fast enough to bit-bang any low speed interface.

      • Re:highly secure solid state digital storage solut (Score:5, Informative)

        by lgw ( 121541 ) on Saturday October 19, 2019 @08:31AM (#59324834) Journal

        Like someone on another website said - communicating with a USB controller is probably beyond the capability of a Series/1

        For a start, the Series/1 is a 16-bit computer. And it's probably EBCDIC .Got any compatible 16-bit USB drivers handy?

        I've personally worked on adapters for this sort of thing for IBM mainframes. You need a PCI card that acts as a peripheral device controller for the mainframe, then you write two drivers: one for the PC to support your modern device through emulating whatever mainframe device you're pretending to be, and one for the mainframe.

        For example, we made a PC that emulated a mainframe tape drive in order to put the mainframe on a TCP/IP network. The PC would translate between 32k tape I/Os and batches of ethernet packets, and the mainframe used a custom tape driver that did appropriate error recovery, such as rewinding the network.

        The IBM Series/1 has an RS/232 port, so you don't even need a custom PCI card.

        • I wouldn't at all be surprised if you could use a modern microcontroller to interface between a 70's-era mini and modern systems/networks, they were slow enough comparatively speaking.

        • Which version of RS-232 is it ? The early serial ports had asymmetric bit rates with half-duplex hardware flow control in one data direction only. This was intended for for slow data channels such as teletypes or serial modems. If I recall, one direction had a bit rate of 75 bits per second (bps) and the other might of been 300 bps.

          Then there was the "Baud Rate" (marketing term) wars where serial modem manufacturers rated their modems on "Baud Rate" so the higher the "Baud Rate" the supposedly better was th

          • I guess it is like saying "I weigh 80kg" which people understand in daily use but is scientifically inaccurate as kg is a unit of mass and not weight (force) which is the Newton.

            Easy fix! We'll switch to "lbs", which is duck typed, and no one will ever have to worry about using the wrong type again. We'll just insert a check in the source code at runtime to use reflection and ask the lbs what kind of unit they are.

            I jest, but that's really the way programmers overwhelmingly think today. This style is actually encouraged.

      • Like someone on another website said - communicating with a USB controller is probably beyond the capability of a Series/1

        For a start, the Series/1 is a 16-bit computer. And it's probably EBCDIC .Got any compatible 16-bit USB drivers handy?

        If only there was a group of people who specialized in making instructions for hardware to talk to software. We could call them "firmware" engineers... Wherever would we find such a unique person who could make old and new hardware talk together via software???

      • The Series 1 supported ASCII over RS232 connections. Add an RS232 to USB adapter (lots available) and a suitable driver, and you are close to a solution that would support SD cards and pendrives.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Most likely it's a custom built floppy drive emulation system. You can get them anywhere for "regular" 5.25 and 3.5 floppies. They simply replace the drive with a flash drive of any sort (Secure Digital sounds secure).

    • ->Certainly, this would be an improvement

      Why?

      Because they should fix it because it isnt broken?

  • You only get to upgrade once every 35 years, so you want to go all the way.

    8 inch floppies were hot in the 1970s.

    Today, current technology, the current hot technology, is the cloud.

    And I am sure there are plenty of consultants that will get it to work. Eventually.

    What could possibly go wrong?

    • No, they upgraded to 3.5-inch floppy diskettes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jmccue ( 834797 )

      You only get to upgrade once every 35 years, so you want to go all the way.

      8 inch floppies were hot in the 1970s.

      Today, current technology, the current hot technology, is the cloud.

      And I am sure there are plenty of consultants that will get it to work. Eventually.

      What could possibly go wrong?

      Well if they go to the Cloud, I am sure we in the rest of the world will eventually see funny shaped clouds.

  • Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday October 19, 2019 @03:55AM (#59324608)

    If it works, don't change it.

    8" floppies have a few key advantages over contemporary systems. First and foremost, we KNOW for a fact that they can retain their data for very, very long times. Half a century, apparently, even. I highly doubt that the average thumb drive will do you that favor. The reason for this is that 8" floppies had a comparably huge area of magnetized foil per bit stored at its disposal. You couldn't even reliably erase those things if you wanted to, to actually destroy data stored on an 8" the recommended procedure was to shred them, then burn the stripes. Not only shred them, that wouldn't suffice.

    Now, we're talking about an environment where you shouldn't have to worry about these discs going "missing", so data retention trumps any other security feature. Besides, being large IS a security feature when it comes to growing feet and walking away.

    Yes, they are slow, yes they don't store remotely the amount of data modern storage media do, but what's your application? How much data do you want to store? Did you really just replace them for the sake of not looking like you're using 70s technology to store data for your nukes? Back then, the computer stuff at least worked reliably!

    • Worked reliably? You've obviously never dropped an eight inch (or five and a quarter) floppy on the floor.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Floppies lose magnetic field and touching heads with the foil, they don't last 5 years if they were continuously read. The military probably wasn't using them all the time and they probably realized that the floppies may not be able to be read reliably in critical situations.

      I still work with floppies of various sorts due to scientific equipment (nuclear research) running MSDOS off two floppies (still being sold as such to date), you can buy boxes of them produced ~5 years ago and you chuck at least 30% for

      • Misconception you are speaking of problems with PC floppies

        the 8 inch are a different beast and very robust after decades, place I worked used them for WAN gear into the early 20-oughts.

        flash drives do NOT have the lifetime of 8 inch

    • Plus of course it is difficult to hoop (shove up ass to smuggle in/out of a secure facility) an 8" floppy and have it work afterwards. It is quite easy to do that with a solid-state storage device.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        is difficult to hoop (shove up ass to smuggle in/out of a secure facility) an 8" floppy and have it work afterwards

        It doesn't have to "work", it just has to retain the data in a way a top forensics team can extract. I don't know if folds in the media outright erase magnetic info or not. (I'm not volunteering to test ... "hold still...fuuuump!")

      • Please don't tell me you have empiric knowledge of that.

    • If it works, don't change it.

      8" floppies have a few key advantages over contemporary systems. First and foremost, we KNOW for a fact that they can retain their data for very, very long times.

      Which would be critical, because who are they going to buy new ones from?

      Magnetic phsical coating materials do sucumb to flaking over time. I have had 8" floppies die from flaking - I think it depends on the manufacturer.

      I did see that we can still get 5.25" floppies yet.

    • Did you even read the article?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Agripa ( 139780 )

      8" floppies have a few key advantages over contemporary systems. First and foremost, we KNOW for a fact that they can retain their data for very, very long times. Half a century, apparently, even. I highly doubt that the average thumb drive will do you that favor. The reason for this is that 8" floppies had a comparably huge area of magnetized foil per bit stored at its disposal.

      My 8" floppies are still readable if I cared to and had the hardware available. So are my non-HD 5.25" floppies. My newer 3.5" disks tend to be degraded but the older ones are good; I am not sure what the deal is with that.

      My tests of all common Flash drives and some *new* SSDs show that they have a retention of less than a year despite industry standards and manufacturer's specifications which say otherwise.

      You couldn't even reliably erase those things if you wanted to, to actually destroy data stored on an 8" the recommended procedure was to shred them, then burn the stripes. Not only shred them, that wouldn't suffice.

      That is completely false; 8" disks, and any floppy disk including ZIP disks, used a media with a r

  • Who was building 8" floppies nowadays? Sincere curiosity: did they keep a huge stockpile (pun intended) or did they have an ad-hoc provider?

  • There's another reason it takes this long (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday October 19, 2019 @06:48AM (#59324726)
    In the mid-1990s, the company I was working for needed to model test a high speed catamaran we were designing. We rented time at the David Taylor Research Center [wikipedia.org], at the time the longest tow tank in the world. About halfway through our stay, I drove up one morning to find a bunch of washing machine-sized metal boxes [ibm.com] piled up in the parking lot. I met with our escort from the Navy who was helping us with the tests.

    me: What are those?
    him: Hard drives. We're throwing them away.
    me: Damn, how old are they?
    him: I think we got them in the 1960s.
    me: Wow. What's their capacity?
    him: 5, maybe 10 megabytes.
    me: So why'd you keep them in storage for so long? Why are you finally getting around to throwing them away?
    him: Oh no. We were using them up until yesterday. Our requisition for new hard drives was finally approved.
    me: ...

    • Mainframe harddrives purchased in the 1960s do not need to meet the specifications the military insists upon for 2019 procurements. I have no doubt much of the reason for antiquated equipment in the military is that it is almost impossible when purchasing new equipment to find something that meets all the arcane requirements dreamed up by administrators whose whole reason to exist is making up these ridiculous criteria.

      • Oh, yes, the requirements can get quite contorted. I will admit that one of my treasured tactics was to leave in one small thing wrong so that they can fix that and feel they've contributed. There _is_ a risk that they will leave the error in, and I've had to be very cautious about documenting the flaw only in very cautiously coded language.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        One of the things that happens is people don't think about what happens in twenty years when they do a project. Do you think people doing cloud-based systems worry about that today? I bet if I did a code review of a 100 cloud projects, at least 80 would have vendor dependencies scattered throughout the system.

        People's job evaluations are almost exclusively based on passing functional tests, at best including non-functional evaluations that can be done right away. Nobody is judged on how maintainable a sys

      • I think what you mean is that there is nothing available today which can meet the security and reliability requirements inherent in the 1960's technology, and that as a results all the requirements have to be downgraded so that they can be met with modern insecure and unreliable crap.

  • Most probable case is that they swapped in an off-the-shelf floppy drive emulator into the case, and played it up as a high-tech secure solution, while paying a contractor $10,000 per drive.

  • SAACS is an upgrade that swaps the floppy disk system for what Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force's 595th Strategic Communications Squadron, described as a "highly secure solid state digital storage solution."

    And here it is!

    https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/cheapest-USB-flash-drives-most-classic_1550118103.html?spm=a2700.7724857.normalList.68.313e51fb7sqOMl [alibaba.com]

  • When I was in the USAF a friend of mine was virtually losing hair over having to keep one of those archaic tape banks like you see in the really old black and white movies working and able to connect to the newer stuff. It was so slow, he had to build a custom interface so they could transfer data.
    The higher ups also wouldn't let him transfer those old tapes to a new, far more efficient and reliable and modern technology and stop using the museum piece.

    They may have finally ditched the 8" floppies in one u

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      Nearly everything is old. The youngest components are the air conditioners, laptop computers, some components of the missile, and the missileers themselves!

  • I no longer need to live in continual dread of USAF and a SWAT team showing up to commandeer my original 8" CP/M floppies, as a national necessity for some imminent nuclear war that I would have been sworn to secrecy about.

  • There are plenty of solid state adapters out there that allow legacy systems to use modern storage.

    There are entire communities of homebrew software developers who use solid state drives on platforms like the Commodore 64, Amiga, and even old TRS-80 and Apple computers.

    Besides, it's not like these Series/1 machines are breaking down. Judging from the many dozens of failed rehosting projects in the past three decades it's better to leave them be.

  • I worked on this system back in the 80s. It was called SACCS and it had been installed in 1961/62. Rumor had it that it was the first computer system in the military to use transistors. It had racks and racks of drawers full of cards with discrete components that could be replaced via soldering by the front-line (so to speak) maintenance people. It communicated with huge modems, over dedicated lines, that featured mechanical resonators and was capable of 2400 bps. It used core memory (I still remember - X,

  • As a retro computer collector, i can tell you those floppies are very reliable and generally hold their data very well.
    The actual problem is with the drives, these are getting unreliable after so many years and can require a whole lot of maintenance to keep running (there are many things that can be the cause of faulty drives) and you won't really know if they're still working well (unless you test them and then again, it might work for the test and not for another floppy). I'm sure nobody wants to find out

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