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The Military Data Storage

German Navy To Replace Aging 8-Inch Floppy Drives With an Emulated Solution (tomshardware.com) 111

Posted by BeauHD from the military-modernizations dept.
Mark Tyson reports via Tom's Hardware: The German Navy is searching for a new storage system to replace the aging 8-inch (20cm) floppy disks which are vital to the running of its Brandenburg class F123 frigates. According to an official tender document, the ideal answer to the German Navy's problems would be a drop-in floppy disk replacement based upon a storage emulation system, reports Golem.de. Germany's Brandenburg class F123 frigates were commissioned in the mid 1990s, so it is understandable that floppy disks were seen as a handy removable storage medium. These drives are part of the frigates' data acquisition system and, thus "central to controlling basic ship functions such as propulsion and power generation," according to the source report.

The F123s are specialized in submarine hunting, and they are also being upgraded in terms of the weapon systems and weapon control systems. Swedish company Saab is the general contractor for the F123 modernizations. It won't be trivial to replace three decades old computer hardware seamlessly, while retaining the full functionality of the existing floppies. However, we note that other companies have wrestled similar problems in recent years. Moreover, there are plenty of emulator enthusiasts using technologies for floppy emulation solutions like Gotek drives which can emulate a variety of floppy drive standards and formats. There are other workable solutions already out there, but it all depends on who the German Navy chooses to deliver the project.
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German Navy To Replace Aging 8-Inch Floppy Drives With an Emulated Solution More

German Navy To Replace Aging 8-Inch Floppy Drives With an Emulated Solution

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  • Given the right collection of gears, pulleys, belts and assorted hardware, it should be possible. The whole system can be made steam powered, nothing but the best and most modern for the German Navy.
  • Whats so fucking hard? no computer system developed in the 90's is hard to emulate or replace. electronics from that era have mostly been replaced, the systems they control aren't that complex

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Mechanical stuff. The 1990s had a lot of computer stuff with extremely precise mechanisms to move things around. Even the average consumer level CD autochanger sold to Joe Sixpack had a lot of moving parts that had to work quite well, especially with 100-400 CD changers.

      With SSDs, we really don't have many moving parts on computers these days. We have fans, and we have mechanical HDDs, and that's pretty much it, other than maybe a pump for a liquid cooled system.

      What is hard to do is come up with stuff t

      • Re:wierd (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MeNeXT ( 200840 ) on Friday July 12, 2024 @11:04PM (#64622461)

        Yes, one can replace a floppy drive with a SD card emulator, but can that stand up to what hostile environments a ship deals with, including possible EMP attacks?

        This tells me you never worked with floppies. Yes. An SD will hold up better than a floppy drive. In every way possible including EMP. How do you think a floppy drive works?

        • My guess is that the magnetic domains in an 8" floppy disk are fairly large. That would make it fairly resistant. However, you could achieve the same by having enough SDs (or whatever storage device you chose) in parallel.

      • Yes, one can replace a floppy drive with a SD card emulator, but can that stand up to what hostile environments a ship deals with, including possible EMP attacks?

        LOL you have never used a floppy drive I see.

    • No these systems are extensively tested

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      Whats so fucking hard? no computer system developed in the 90's is hard to emulate or replace

      I see you've never done any emulation work.

      The older the hardware, the harder it is to find good information about it. Not everything is documented. Not all documentation is accurate. Some documentation is misleading. Often there's no documentation at all. That's just for starters. You will probably need an oscilloscope at some point. Oh, and ancient bugs in the software will lead you to false conclusions about the hardware which will lead you to false conclusions about the software... Fun.

      That's in

      • I think it is easy to do. It just takes time and money... and debugging. Looks like a fun job.

        • And that's basically the critical problem: Zero money was allocated to upgrade it. So it didn't get upgraded. Then another 5 years have passed and now the cost to upgrade has tripled because even more stuff is out of date, you don't have the programmers familiar with the old system anymore, and you need to rewrite even more of the code - code which people don't understand anymore, not without a lot of time examining it and figuring it out.

    • What is fucking hard is: it is a floppy drive. Not an IDE or SCSI drive.

      That means the ancient software doing the read and write is basically writing and trading the data bit by bit.

      Yes, bit, not byte. Most of those drives, could not even store bytes. For some reason that I forgot, the maximum number of consecutive 1's was 5. So a stream if 8 bit bytes has to be broken up into a stream of 5 bit words. Perhaps it was begin of sector and end of sector markers.

      The device controlling hardware was primitive. The

  • 8-inch floppies in the 1990s? (Score:4, Informative)

    by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Friday July 12, 2024 @08:29PM (#64622355) Homepage Journal

    Germany's Brandenburg class F123 frigates were commissioned in the mid 1990s, so it is understandable that floppy disks were seen as a handy removable storage medium.

    No. No, it is not. When I was in high school or early college, circa 1995, I bought some 8-inch floppy drives and disks on a surplus sale just for grins. They had been obsolete since before I was born.

    The 5.25" floppy disk came out in 1976, with twice the capacity of an 8-inch disk at a fraction of the size. The 3.5" disk obsoleted those, in turn, in 1981.

    The entire notion of an 8-inch floppy drive being "understandable" in the 1990s is unfathomable. It shouldn't even have been possible to still buy 8-inch floppy drives in the 1990s other than in a junk sale from somebody scrapping them. Outside of special military contracts, I doubt that a single 8-inch drive was manufactured beyond 1980, give or take a year or two, and in a sane universe, they would have been built exclusively as replacement parts, not for use in new designs.

    And yet, apparently, in the 1990s, some company was quite literally building ancient, decades-obsolete pieces of computer hardware just for these obscure military/government use cases, and using them in new designs. That, right there, is a perfect example of why government (and particularly military) spending always seems out of control. How many thousand dollars did they spend for each of those giant behemoths with their whopping 80-kilobyte capacity?

    If you had said that they still used 3.5" floppies, then yes, maybe it would have been understandable. But 8-inch disks by the 1990s were such an anachronism that people looked at them and said, "What's that?" I'm sorry, but there's not enough crack in the world for that to be understandable.

    • Outside of special military contracts, I doubt that a single 8-inch drive was manufactured beyond 1980

      This. So much this.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cinder6 ( 894572 )

      That was my first thought. I was born in ‘88, and even the 5.25” was outmoded enough by then that most kids I knew in the ‘90s had never seen one, let alone an 8” disk. I distinctly remember a lesson in the computer lab where the teacher took one out of a cabinet to show us how much smaller storage had gotten over the years. “Did you know floppy disks used to be this big? How about this big?”

      The 3.5” HD (not even the first 3.5” disk!) came out in 1986, for chr

      • The 3.5" FLOPPY. According to Wikipedia the 3.5" hdd was introduced by Rodime in 1983, but a lot of people who didn't know anything about tech used to call the 3.5" rigid plastic encased floppies 'hard disks' because they were ignorant. The term floppy refers to the disc material not the housing it's in.

      • The 3.5'' HD floppy achieved 1.44 Mb and with that only slightly surpassed an 8'' DS/DD floppy (which held 1232Kb).

        • The 3.5'' HD floppy achieved 1.44 Mb and with that only slightly surpassed an 8'' DS/DD floppy (which held 1232Kb).

          Nitpick: The (very rarely-used, I'll be the first to say) Amiga HD floppy could hold 1.76 MB on the same medium... but these floppy drives were only available as an aftermarket add-on, or hacked drives from the very last A1200s sold by Escom.

    • Yeah I thought this was weird too.
      Could be that the systems places on the ship are of much older design than the ship itself

    • They had been obsolete since before I was born.

      The 5.25" floppy disk came out in 1976, with twice the capacity of an 8-inch disk at a fraction of the size.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:8-inch floppies in the 1990s? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday July 12, 2024 @11:09PM (#64622467)

      IBM started selling the System/36 (5362) in 1984 and it came standard with an 8 inch floppy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • In 1976, 5.25 inch floppies only could hold a tiny fraction of what 8 inch drives were capable of. A typical single sided 5.25 diskette formatted capacity was only 70kb, whereas single sided 8 inch disks with the same magnetic coating typically held 250kb. Not to mention that 8 inch drives used a twice larger bitrate, and hence were much faster than their 5.25 inch counterparts. In the end, 5.25 inch drives achieved parity with 8 inch floppies in 1984, with the release of IBM PC/AT and its 1.2Mb HD drive,

    • There was probably some reliability study. Some militaries were still using vacuum tubes at that time because they were more reliable in the event of RF-based attacks.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mha ( 1305 )

      Germany's Brandenburg class F123 frigates were commissioned in the mid 1990s, so it is understandable that floppy disks were seen as a handy removable storage medium.

      No. No, it is not. When I was in high school or early college, circa 1995, I bought some 8-inch floppy drives and disks on a surplus sale just for grins. They had been obsolete since before I was born.

      "Commissioned" is when they started service. But they were planned in the 1980!

      Given the development model of such very complex projects, going back and redoing the computers would be an impossible task: That was the time of very rapid change. If they had had to redo part of the design, they would never have been finished, because we got a significantly upgraded much more capable IT device generation every two to three years! Today speed of change does not compare.

      Also, why would they???

      The purpose of the d

    • That is all wrong.
      A 8" drive is significantly faster than a 5.25" drive, and stores nearly the same amount of data as a 3.5" drive.

      The data on a 8" floppy is 1.2MB, not 80kB.

      At the time of inception and planning of the ships: neither 5" nor 3" drives existed.

      3.5" drives are run by the drive hardware. You tell it, give me sectors 25 to 37, and it does. And that is it.

      On an 8" drive as well as on 5Â/â" drive you are basically accessing a bit stream device, that has several tracks. You can not even r

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        The data on a 8" floppy is 1.2MB, not 80kB.

        The original 8" floppy capacity was 80k. I guess they upped the density by the end. The maximum density of a 5.25" floppy was also 1.2 megabytes, though, so basically no matter how you look at it, they're huge and no better than a 5.25" floppy. And the end-stage capacity of a 3.5" disc is 2.88 MB.

        Either way, no matter how much the higher-density head and stepper tech from newer 3.5"/5.25" drives trickled down into 8-inch drives for military and mainframe use, the consumer stuff still ended up beating it.

        • Sorry, you are wrong.
          Someone linked the wiki site about floppy disk. It is in the discussion. Look over it, you find it. The first 5.25" disks I used on my Apple ][ were a bit less than 140kB, with tricks - using two extra tracks, which not every drive supported, you came to 140kB. If there ever was a 80kB 8" floppy then it must have been a extremely early model. Perhaps a proof of concept and you saw it on a exhibition. I think you memorize it wrong and it was 800kB.

          The design of the ships started in the m

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            Sorry, you are wrong. Someone linked the wiki site about floppy disk. It is in the discussion. Look over it, you find it. The first 5.25" disks I used on my Apple ][ were a bit less than 140kB, with tricks - using two extra tracks, which not every drive supported, you came to 140kB. If there ever was a 80kB 8" floppy then it must have been a extremely early model. Perhaps a proof of concept and you saw it on a exhibition. I think you memorize it wrong and it was 800kB.

            Tell that to the Computer history museum [computerhistory.org]. No, I didn't "memorize it wrong".

            The design of the ships started in the mid 1970s.

            Again, Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] says you're wrong.

            "Blohm + Voss was contracted to develop and build the ships to a clean-sheet design in 1989."

            No idea about your 3.5" experiments. On the Macs 3.5" disks had "smart" drive controller hardware. An interrupt could not disrupt reading or writing.

            Not only have I worked on the MkLinux floppy code, which was derived from Copland, but I've also compared it against the Mac OS 9 floppy driver source code, which some folks on the relevant team managed to get me access to. I can assure you that the reason interrupts couldn't disrupt reading or writing is

            • ""Blohm + Voss was contracted to develop and build the ships to a clean-sheet design in 1989.""
              That means the inception and design started 5 to 10 years before. That is no brainer, or not?

              You've obviously never done kernel programming in any modern operating system. Interrupts interrupt the kernel all the time.
              Depends on the processor architecture. Most simply queue the interrupt source and do not really interrupt privileged code. As far as I remember, old intel processors did not even have "hard" interrupt

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by dgatwood ( 11270 )

                ""Blohm + Voss was contracted to develop and build the ships to a clean-sheet design in 1989."" That means the inception and design started 5 to 10 years before. That is no brainer, or not?

                I'm sure that someone was coming up with requirements a couple of years before, but requirements would typically be things like crew capacity, missile launch tubes, radar and comms capabilities, etc., not precise technical details like what kind of storage the computers use, unless there's a reason to specify it. Doing detailed design in the requirements would completely defeat the purposes of doing a clean-sheet design on everything else.

                To be fair, though, I'm not saying that they *didn't* specify that t

                • That's fair. I'm pretty sure there's no way you could usefully do any sort of preemptive multithreading on a 6502. :-DOf course I would. Because that is what we did that time. But: a 6502 has no kernel mode. So every interrupt would interrupt what ever you are doing.

                  Regarding the drives:
                  a) you buy the cheapest that do the job.
                  b) as I mentioned in other posts - perhaps the disks were formatted in a specific way
                  c) the increase of storage was overlapping while 8" and 5.25" were aging - so calling one superior

    • That was exactly my thinking. 8-inch discs were already ancient in the 90's. But even then, it was just a drive with a connector, so it shouldn't be hard to replace, especially with the budgets they have to squander, seeing they were already using obsolete drives back then. I wonder why they just don't replace larger parts of the system. But I'll bet it isn't hard to replace the storage part with something even more reliable and up to date. Reliable storage systems for these type of usage aren't anything ne

  • It's not that emulation is hard (Score:4, Insightful)

    by localroger ( 258128 ) on Friday July 12, 2024 @08:49PM (#64622365) Homepage
    It's that everything that goes into a command and control battlefield system has to meet certain standards. That stuff is hardly ever less than 10 years behind consumer grade because just slapping it in your robot and proving it can read the disk isn't good enough; you have to prove it will read it so many times, under conditions of temperature and vibration, with guaranteed supply chains for replacement parts and procedures for troubleshooting and repair. And while there may be very obviously vastly better solutions waiting to be picked up at Best Buy, the problem is that those solutions have to be documented to be better, to standards the military can accept. There are entire industries that exist entirely to provide these obsolete parts for military systems. (Spacecraft are similar, which is why the STS and Hubble were quietly upgrading from 8-bit to I386 in the 1990's when anything less than a Pentium would have been laughed off the shelves in a consumer market.) Until very recently, and for all I know to this day, NORAD was using computer hardware built in the 1960's to run missile defense. It just a lot easier to keep that obsolete junk running than it would have been to re-engineer it all, take it offline, test the replacements, re-train everybody, lay in new stocks of replacement parts, and on and on.
    • I would question the wisdom of sticking to ancient C2 software. Yes, replacing it requires some effort, but technology has moved on, and not just the platform running the software but also sensors, comms and so on. But then again, it's Germany. I stuck my nose into a German Leopard tank the other day, and it looked like a damn time capsule.

  • Gex Xer here - One of the claims is not true (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve ( 949321 ) on Friday July 12, 2024 @08:56PM (#64622373)
    Gen Xer, career IT guy here. Started my career in the late 1980s after graduating college. My first job was working for a branch of the US military as a civilian computer programmer. I specifically and strongly disagree with this statement:

    Germany's Brandenburg class F123 frigates were commissioned in the mid 1990s, so it is understandable that floppy disks were seen as a handy removable storage medium.

    I call bs on that claim. Even back in the late 80s, 8 inch floppy drives were antiquated tech. Yeah, where I worked we had exactly one system that still used them and it was an old Wang computer that had a very specialized purpose and was only used for that one purpose. By the mid 90s, 5.25 inch floppy drives were going away and 3.5 inch were pretty much the standard. I don't like to name the branch of the US military I worked for because I liked the people there, including the military, but you would not believe how much old tech we used. I used to say that the motto of this branch ought to be "Using yesterday's technology today". We still had one system that used punch cards until it got replaced in early 90s and it was badly antiquated by then. So the Germans using 8 inch floppies in the mid 90s wasn't "understandable". It was dumbassery by a bad contractor, typical of government military contract work. The contractor or government probably got some kind of sale on the drives because they were essentially obsolete and that's the likely real reason they were used.

    • I really don't understand the sentiment that just because something is old that means it's bad. Something used punched cards in the 1990s. Did it work as designed and was it reliable?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drnb ( 2434720 )

      Even back in the late 80s, 8 inch floppy drives were antiquated tech.

      Late 1980s, we needed 8in discs to use some specialized hardware in an electrical engineering class. I think it was for FPGA or something like that.

    • An 8" inch floppy disk has roughly 10 times the storage capacity of a 5.25" disk.
      A 8" inch floppy DRIVE is nearly 4 times faster than a 5.25" DRIVE.

      So the Germans using 8 inch floppies in the mid 90s wasn't "understandable".
      It is understandable. Because the damn system was planned and incepted in the late 1970s.
      1993/1994 was the the date the first ship was put into service.

  • Much less a stiffy. So when are we going to let Germany start bombing Israel? Asking for an enemy. We need a new Irony Curtain.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Gavino ( 560149 )
      The last time I saw an 8-inch floppy was in a VHS movie in my college days, starting John Holmes

      • Some things you are supposed to keep up on the inside. We don't need to know about those kinds of things. Especially about an 8" floppy. As an American by birth I have to say that advice is for you as I am exempt from from such rules. All streets are one way here.

  • I've seen plug-and-play floppy drive emulators that have a USB port on the front for a flash drive.

  • The maligned 1.2 MB floppy might be a better option at this point. The only difference is that it has 80 tracks available rather than the 8 inch drive's 77 tracks, which shouldn't be a problem in most situations, and can probably be worked around in the rest.

    Oh right, those are easy to emulate! So it's the same as the SF Bay transit situation where they send their updates on floppy disks, you just need emulated floppy disk drives and put the software on SD cards and treat them like really tiny floppy disks.

  • "commissioned in the mid 1990s, so it is understandable that floppy disks were seen as a handy removable storage medium". Okay, floppy disks were all the rage in the mid-90s. But not 8" floppies, not even 5.25" floppies, but 3.5" floppies. Even the 5.25" floppies were considered pretty much obsolete in 90s, not even to mention 8" floppies. I guess the designers were not that computer tech savvy, and somebody with new old stock managed to create a lucrative deal, perhaps by claiming that the 8" floppies are

    • Facepalm. And the planning of the ship class started in the late 1970.
      A 8" floppy is far superior to 5âoe anyway.
      Nearly same storage as a mid 1900 3.5" drive, but 4 times faster.
      And you have full control what bits, yes bits, not bytes, you write on the disk.
      E.g full control how many tracks you want, and hence the distance of the tracks to each other. Important in taught sea conditions when your drive head can go anywhere. You do not want to overwrite a neighbouring track just because you hit a wave. Or

  • Funny! "8-inch (20cm) floppy disks" (Score:3)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Saturday July 13, 2024 @10:11AM (#64623077)
    were already obsolete in the late 1990's when that class ship was commissioned. If they use 8" floppies ,I wonder about the disk controller and the computer system in general! Something tells me the whole computer system was obsolete/ or almost so when installed!

    • Of course it was obsolete. As it was _planned_ and Okey'ed 10 years before. And when it was okay'ed it was probably on hardware that had at least a 5 year track record of being solid.

      We are talking about a war ship. You might like to make fun about German frigs: but the the rest of the world does not.

      • FYI I got out of the USAF in 1979. I had 2 8" floppy drives and 4 16MB 2 platter 16" hard drives in my first home brew s100 computer in the early 80's. And 8" floppies, their disk controllers and bus architecture were obsolete by 1989.
        Also, do not see German mentioned in my post! And I wouldn't "make fun about German frigs" or most things built by Germans. Who are known for great engineering and skilled trades people.

        And on a last note, I'm not sure the US has finished removing 8" floppies from our nuclea

    • so in your world warship systems run latest processor in a gamer pc with cool mood lights and use usb stick for removable media, and of couse get upgraded every two years,

      • I got out of the USAF in 1979 (flight simulator technician). You pulled out the "gamer pc with cool mood lights" comment on the wrong person. Have a great day ;)
        • seems he got it spot on and if you were doing that in 79 which is around when the designs were started for these ships you would know that 8 inch floppies were not obsolete at that time at all. or do you think a warship class was conceived designed and built in just a 5 to 10 year period? surely you aren't that naive?

        • then you should know better about 8 inch floppies, used by U.S. military until 2019

  • > It won't be trivial to replace three decades old computer hardware seamlessly, while retaining the full functionality of the existing floppies

    $mount -o loop /path/to/floppy.img /mnt/floppy

  • What is missed is that Germany is running 30 year old ships - not uncommon in Nato navies but 30 years for a front line warship is pushing it without major upgrades and even then it's really at the end of it's service live. The oldest Frigate in the Royal Navy is HMS Lancaster launched in 1991 but it is now in life extension mode and spent 2 years in refit in 2017-2019.

    Germany seriously dragged it's feet over the last 20 years on defence spending and is now having to play catch up with aging equipment and l

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