The Defense Department’s Strategic Automated Command and Control System,
which is used to send and receive emergency action messages to U.S.
nuclear forces. The system is running on a 1970s IBM computing platform,
and still uses 8-inch floppy disks to store data. “Replacement parts
for the system are difficult to find because they are now obsolete,” GAO
said. The Pentagon is initiating a full replacement and says the floppy
disks should be gone by the end of next year. The entire upgrade will
take longer.
8" floppy disks. (((Reaches for the antiacids))) Does anyone find that as horrific as I do? Good to know that the floppy disks with be gone at the end of next year.
They’ll probably be replacing them with 3 1/2" not-so-floppy disks.
All part of breaking gov’t to “prove” it’s broken.
Who in blazes even still makes 8" disks? I haven’t even seen a 5.25" in at least 15 years.
People laughed at me when I bought seventeen pallets of them in 1988. Well now who’s laughing, huh? I still know a few people at STRATCOM…time for my big play.
The government would be happy to purchase those from you. Is $1B enough?
Ohhhh. Memories.
When I saw 8" floppy’s I thought it would be about the system I helped install at US Customs way back when. They had limited funds and a big problem and this was a quick expedient to “take the pain away”.
And it worked!
It was a system to collect import/export duties that were being missed. Customs knew ‘missed’ part, but Customs did not know how “much” they were missing. Now they found out.
The system worked and millions upon millions came rolling into the Treasury! Daily, by the millions. Now they got their attention! More funds were given and the system improved to the point Customs was #2 only to the IRS in bringing $$ to the Treasury.
There was another system that just got into the craw of senior military. It was called WWMCCS, it was a bad contract from the start, it went world-wide and cost a bundle. And so critical, “How can we shut this thing down? Ever?” rang true.
One General in particular wanted it dead and replaced ASAP. He finally got to a position where he could do it and got its replacement in place. Then, to emphasize the old system’s death and his victory, they held a formal shut down ceremony of the old system.
Gathered in the computer room the General symbolically pulled the power from the mainframe and - nothing happened! The back-up system had kicked in! (Like it was supposed to do.) They forgot to turn that off.
From the back of the room someone yells the most classic line in horror-movie history: “It’s alive!!”, and the entire room exploded in laughter, including the General.
I never thought I would hear “a programming language called COBOL”. Has it been that long ago that the world turned on COBOL?
I once met Admiral Grace Hopper, an earlier developer/promoter of COBOL at the Atlanta airport waiting for her flight back to DC. I introduced myself. A nice quick chat and she reached into her bag and gave me one of her famous “nanoseconds”, 11.8" of wire that she used as a teaching aid of an example of the distance electricity travels in one-billionth of a second. I still have it. At the time Admiral Hopper was 80! And still in uniform.
Some use a programming language called COBOL, dating to the late 1950s and early 1960s.
So, this is technically correct (the best kind of correct!), but misleading. The COBOL specification was started in 1959, but I’m willing to bet that almost no actual COBOL 60 (original version) code is still running. Far more likely they’re running COBOL 74 or higher. I mean, it’s still mid-70’s or possibly 80’s code, but then so were parts of Windows until a decade or so ago.
Also, COBOL was an excellent language for what it did, and was used everywhere. The latest version specification was in 2014, so it’s not a dead language. Most of the true experts in it are nearly dead, or at least close to retirement, though.
Probably they should upgrade from the 8" floppies to 3-1/2", or maybe Zip Drives.
New for the sake of new isn’t necessarily the best thing. Sometimes changing to a new system fails. Don’t forget that most of these systems have been evolving over decades. They do needed things beyond many of the new systems. There are many examples where some contractor has promised something new and shiny that has failed leaving the government with the old “obsolete” system that has the virtue of working.
The NRA has mandated that the government not use computers when related to gun stuff.
I found this website: > http://www.athana.com/html/diskette.html that sells them (contact for pricing!), but on the page footer it says, “All contents copyright 1997, ATHANA International, Inc”
1997…it was a very good year. The Web Browser was about 3 1/2 years old, Netscape 4.0 had just been released, IE 3 was giving Netscape some competition. Windows 95 was state of the art. Firefox was still 8 years away, YouTube and Twitter were still around 9 years away. Oh, and don’t forget the joy of dialup connections at a whopping 33.6kb/s.
Citations?
I love how Pres. Obama will get blamed for this, while it is so clearly the House GOP’s fault considering they hold the purse.
On the acquisition side, rule of thumb is that govnt buys equipment after it has been around for 7 years.Takes that long to “discover” it. To be fair, those mainframes could take months even yrs to covert from an older system. Very traumatic.
So they buy obsolescent or even obsolete equipment, and then keep it forever.
In the IBM 360, 370 days, I recall some clients using 80-column tab cards.
Or, using punch cards instead of tape or disk.
Those 9-inch floppies were originally invented to carry the operating system of the IBM 370. It replaced decks of punch cards.
Weren’t the air traffic controllers running off of IBM 360s?
Fuck…
Can someone loan them an iPhone? They could run the entire system off the processing power of something that fits in my pocket…
I find it humorous that the save icon is a picture of a 3 1/3" disk
And how many times have various government agencies lobbied Congress for increased funding to upgrade their IT?
And Hopper gave currency to the term “bug,” meaning a defect in a piece of software or equipment.
Evidently an old mainframe had a short caused by some insect.
“The federal government is years and in some cases decades behind the
private sector,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House
Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a statement.
“Taxpayers deserve a government that leverages technology to serve them,
rather than one that deploys insecure, decades-old technology that
places their sensitive and personal information at risk.”
Then fund it, asshole. That means enough funding to replace entire sytems, clients, update the software, training, etc. It’s easy to point and say “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” but technology depends on a lot of interrelated components.
Maybe the management of our nuclear arsenal is more important than another tax break for the Kochs and Monsanto.