this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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German Navy still uses 8-inch floppy disks, working on emulating a replacement (arstechnica.com)
submitted 4 months ago by Alphane_Moon to c/hardware
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The air defence weapons system I was trained to operate during my stint in the Finnish army has a simulator system that uses floppies as well. Doesn't seem that uncommon.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

8" floppies?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Ok, I can understand when legacy tech is used in manufacturing or environments were hyper-reliablity is a must, but at sea? Really? (I suppose similar logic might apply, somewhere.)

Navy ships are brutal environments for any tech. Sure, there are some spaces with decent environmental controls, but even those are far from pristine. It takes quite a bit of work to secure everything for rough seas, and some equipment will be lost during that process and it's usually the most fragile things first.

If it wasn't for the environment at sea, it's probably the Jr. sailors that are the next highest risk to data integrity. I don't give a fuck what country you are from, young sailors are a special kind of stupid. (I was one as well, so I have room to speak.) They will bend things that shouldn't be bent and put things in places you would never imagine. Unbreakable things get broke quick, is my point.

So aside from some story telling, my point is that they are 8" floppies and aren't the most durable of things. The German navy should have ditched those things the second another option became available.

[–] Alphane_Moon 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I imagine bureaucracy is a powerful force in an environment like the German navy.

From my completely uneducated perspective, the German military are extremely complacent and not equipped to implement change.

That being said, I believe the US minuteman nukes were also reliant on floppies until recently.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

US minuteman nukes were also reliant on floppies until recently.

That is the hyper-reliablity case that I was referring to. In extreme cases like that, the systems (should) go through millions of dollars in testing, taking hundreds of hours. You can't replace one bit without retesting the entire system across every single platform where it is implemented. (That is the logic anyway.)

Your average military equipment is not glamorous. The tech is raw steel, lots of explosives and a fuck ton of duct tape and prayers. (Excluding some types of ordinance, actually. Some of that stuff is insanely complicated.)

Also, please excuse some of my rough exaggeration. There is truth behind it but it's probably not as shitty as I make it sound. (Old habit.)