Good-bye Floppy Disk: The US military will no longer use them. Here’s how everything will change
Even the US military is adapting to technological progress and definitively abandons the Floppy Disks or the famous ” diskettes ” that were usually used by the coordination system of nuclear bombers. The new filing system is coming.
The US military continued to use huge 8-inch floppy disks in an ” old-fashioned ” computer from the 1970 to receive nuclear launch orders from the President. A solution that was not at all in danger of being tampered with by hackers on the Net but which made that kind of action so important that it was decidedly obsolete with respect to technological progress in recent times.
Well, all this finally seems to have an end. The US strategic command has announced that it has replaced the units with a ” highly secure solid-state digital storage solution ” by permanently abandoning floppy disks.
Good-bye Floppy Disk: How the system works now
The new system, expressed by Lieutenant Colonel Jason Rossi, highlights safety features and first-rate equipment. In detail for this type of storage, it is used in an ” old ” system called Strategic Automated Command and Control System, or SACCS. A system that is still used today by US nuclear forces to send emergency action messages from command centers to field forces, and is adamant precisely because it was created long before the Internet existed.
” It can’t be hacked since it doesn’t have an IP address. It’s a very unique system – it’s old, and it’s very good, ” said Rossi.
The Department of Defense planned to replace the old IBM Series/1 SACCS computer and to ” upgrade its data-storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal 2017 “.
Floppy disks, along with the IBM Series 1 computer, were one of the oldest systems used by the US military to manage the automatic strategic command and control system. The floppy disks have been retired while for the computer, the Air Force has not externalized any data, and we do not know if it has actually been replaced or is still being updated.
According to Lieutenant Colonel Rossi, yes the SACCS system is perhaps not the maximum of the technological avant-garde of the moment but for sure ” it cannot be hacked. It is a unique system: old, but well functioning “.
