After building for just IoT stuff I really like things that work without changing for years. I can't imagine how change adverse nuclear weapons engineers and staff would be.
It's funny too that spy thriller movies always envision military systems as super futuristic and having cutting edge technology.
I don't remember how reliable floppy disks were but at least data integrity is a well-understood science so there should be no problem detecting corruption. The new system uses SSDs which could be a bit concerning, as they're known to be more prone to corruption than HDDs; however the same thing i just said about data corruption applies to SSDs as well so it's probably not a big deal.
On the other hand, the write amplification problem is very concerning and I can only hope that they're using full-disk encryption.
I think it's important to realize that there hasn't been a lot of meaningful advancement as far as software is concerned for at least a decade. Hardware never stopped getting better but that just enabled people to write bloated, unreliable software.
Hopefully they studied the data retention of those SSDs and use wear leveling.
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21347890
And when you submitted it again a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37174838
I've been heavily involved with computers since the mid 80s and I've never even touched one of those 8". I've seen one in a museum that's all. They were just a bigger version of the 5 1/4" floppy which I used loads and I still have most of them (and USB hardware to read them, the greaseweazle). But by the time the commodore 64 and the pc came on the scene the 8" was already obsolete. So much so that I've never seen them in the shop even back then.
I know some US home computers used them, like the IMSAI which featured in WarGames (nice tie-in with this post). But really, those 8"'ers are old.
ayaros•6mo ago
M95D•6mo ago