United States Nuclear Arsenal Controlled By 1970s Computers With 8-inch Floppy Disks

Common Sense Evaluation ^

[Oatka]

I'll bet the military has a supplier who still makes them...for $5,000 per diskette.

The ought to check out eBay:

Ten for $40. Dunno about the 5-year warranty though.

I had a college course where the students had to stand up and give a 10-minute dissertation about something related to their job.

I was a programmer then (RPGII) and remember holding up a box of 80-column cards (1,000 I think) in one hand and the new 8 " floppy and extolling the virtues of data processing and how they had advanced to where that one box could be stored on just one of those floppies - I was in awe.

[nicollo]

Anybody want Nuclear Missiles controlled by Windows-10?

"Heh, Cortana! Nuke Iran."
"Sure! Playing New Kid In Town now"

[GingisK]

I guess it depends on your OS. The systems I used stopped the spindles.

[GingisK]

They were created in a time when some people were still hand wiring magnetic core memory.

They were created thirty years after WWII. Could you make a Rolls Merlin engine for a P51 in your home shop?

[GingisK]

The virus had been spread via removable media.

In this case an 8 inch floppy, which is not readily available. If you could manage to get one into a control center of, say, a missile silo, you'd find that the computer in question might not have an operating system that would just haul off and read it. It would be even more unlikely that you could possibly conceive of anything that would perturb the software running on it. There would be no Java, and it sounds like an IBM Series One. That is not a common instruction set in this age.

[GingisK]

Hacking predates and is not dependent on the internet.

Hacking is a function of the OS and the native instruction set. I never saw hacking until the IBM PCs came into being. Browsers didn't exist until access to the Internet became common, perhaps in the late '80s. Those old machine just wouldn't run anything that was shoved into the drive. They were always going to read something in particular.

Oh, USB drives are very recent. Back in the 8-inch floppy days, not just everyone had a computer, let alone the floppy drives. Hobby machines generally read FSK from Phillips audio tapes.

When 8-inch drives were seen in the general public, they were on Radio Shack Z80 based CPM systems. The computers used by the government were usually minicomputers like PDP-8s, PDP-11s, and a very wide range of other machines. They were all unique, and costs started around $12,000.

The military practiced "physical security" in those days. Hacking didn't happen.

[GingisK]

8" drives can unload the heads, but they don't stop the spindle motor.

Well, dang. I checked with some of my old cohorts, and they tell me the same thing. Getting old is no fun whatsoever. I have worked with a number of mini-computers with floppies. You'd think I'd remember something like that.

My favorites were the PDP-11/45 and the Motorola 68000 series.

[dayglored]

> Getting old is no fun whatsoever. I have worked with a number of mini-computers with floppies. You'd think I'd remember something like that.

I'm in the same state. Stuff I haven't thought about for a couple decades might as well be written on a crumpled scrap of paper in a rusted-out self-storage unit in Siberia.

As for the rest of it that I remember, a good 30% of it I remember wrong. The good news is, nobody else is around to contradict me! :-)

> My favorites were the PDP-11/45 and the Motorola 68000 series.

I worked with a couple of PDP-11/23 machines (the LSI boards) in the 1980's. Never got to build a 68K homebrew, but I wrote some device drivers in the 90's for a Samsung handheld that used the FreeScale Dragonball, a 68K-based microcontroller. Wonderful instruction set, very sane.