this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Memes

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[–] [email protected] 91 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

The US nuclear arsenal still runs on floppy disks.

EDIT: The Air Force claimed they finished a migration from 8-inch floppy disks to solid state storage in June 2019, so my info is slightly out of date. They did use floppy disks for over 50 years though (1968-2019).

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (3 children)

The thing with random internet replies: you never know if it's true (you could look it up, but that would make life to easy).

So this is or:

  • really scary
  • unbelievable smart cause nobody knows how to use them
  • not true

Probably there are some other options but I'll go for a combination of the first and second one and hoping for the third

[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Doing a bit of research online, my info is slightly out of date. They used floppy disks from 1968 to 2019. In 2019, they migrated from the old 8 inch floppy to "highly secure solid-state storage". They don't specify what type of solid state storage they actually use now though.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

3.5" is much more solid than 8" floppies.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'd guess it's one of these.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

"Highly secure solid-state storage"

Probably used the same encryption scheme on an SD card adapter that plugs directly into the floppy drive lol.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It was true at one point, but has since changed. The systems are totally air-gapped and worked 100% of the time, so there was never a reason to change them.

Also true: Boeing still uses floppies to update their 747s.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Yup, we don't want it to crash.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It boils down to "never change a running system"

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 9 months ago (3 children)

It's not the disks it's what's ON the disks

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Supposedly on the disks. The files were saved, but did the FAT table eat itself was the question. 😂

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

FAT table eat itself

heh

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (4 children)

And they always act as if there's no way it could have been copied and exist somewhere else.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (4 children)

But my dude... Diskettes had Copy Protection! /s

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I remember when floppies where called floppy because they were huge and floppy (that's what she said). Before the hard shell smaller floppies became a thing.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago

The disk part was still floppy.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Still, hard floppys was really easy to damage - fart near it, and it's unreadable

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (7 children)

My favorite thing was messing with the metal slider until it broke.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

Fidge spinners of their time

It was that or ballpoint pens. Good thing we still have the latter since even fidget spinners seem to have disappeared

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

I think in the later dying days of the floppy disk, the manufacturers made them with really poor quality. It used to be in earlier years, say the 8-bit years when floppy disks were still floppy, that the disks could keep your data for years if you treated them like vinyl records and never touched the magnetic surface.

In the late years, I've seen floppy disks that failed almost immediately.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They weren’t that bad. Hell AOL mailed millions of those damn things in envelopes and they usually worked.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Tape over the read only hole and reuse it: H A C K E R M A N

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Woolsey! We need a stargate community :D

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago

The most important 1.44 MB you can imagine.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (1 children)

what are all these old memes doing with save icons? /s

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

SAVING THE WORLD

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (5 children)

My first porn was on floppy disk

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (5 children)

There's something poetic about using a floppy disk to get hard

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (4 children)

My first porn was probably NNTP (newsgroups) before I even had the actual WWW. Had to learn how to stitch images together from multiple posts in the early-mid '90s.

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[–] altima_neo 27 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

They can, actually... Many nuclear bases in the US use floppy disks for code to reduce the risk of a cyberattack and because upgrading that intricate of a system is prohibitively expensive for how little good it would do.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago

Well considering most code is under a megabyte it makes sense

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Nowadays it's microSD cards.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

I mean, microSD makes for much more interesting drama. You can hide it in the lining of a suit, sew it underneath the skin, hide it in a ball point pen, in your pet. MicroSd drama is much more sneaky.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I remember when movies/games first started using UBS sticks to contain important plot-macguffin data, it seemed very high-tech and expensive. Of course, now high-capacity sticks are incredibly cheap so anyone can have a whole drawer of them.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

I liked when they used minidisks. It looked high tech and you could toss it around, unlike a cd. And it was bigger than a usb stick, so it was a better plot device.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

A simple command line in AutoGPT can be enough, as proven with ChaosGPT. But I am more afraid of human stupidity than of AI, it is this that is going to destroy us.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If AI destroys us, it will be a result of human stupidity.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Remember a Decepticon that transformed into a cassette?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Poor Soundwave, he and his minions are obsolete! Maybe they can get upgrades so he transforms into an MP3 player and they transform into SD cards.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

Climate change increased drastically since the era of floppy disks, coincidence!?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

It's a goober

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

Shredder and Usagi seem to be holding Zip discs rather than floppy discs. I have no idea what Ripster is holding.

In fact, Lexington seems to be the only one with a floppy disc here

[–] altima_neo 9 points 9 months ago

Yeah that was the episode where shredder had some software that could create holographic clones of people. But Bebop and Rocksteady fucked up and caused the machine to make Shredder behave like Michaelangelo.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

They are truly iconic.

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