“Solid state storage” replaces IBM Series/1’s floppy drive.
Source: Air Force finally retires 8-inch floppies from missile launch control system | Ars Technica
It’s now late 2019, and the United States Air Force has finally phased out 8-inch floppy disks.
By Simon Black via Sovereign Man
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances and your prosperity.
Air Force Missile Command finally retires 1960s era Floppy Disks
I suspect our younger readers might not know what a floppy disk is, let alone have ever seen one.
Whereas today we have USB drives etc. to copy and store files, the standard used to be ‘floppy disks’ several years ago.
(As a kid in the early 1980s, I used to play on my dad’s computer, which had dual 5 ¼ inch floppy disk drives. It was a real beast of a machine…)
A 5 ¼ inch floppy disk had a maximum capacity of 1.2 megabytes. Today even the smallest USB stick is at least 1,000x the size.
The history of floppy disks goes back to the 1960s when 8-inch floppy disks were developed.
And the 8-inch floppies could store a whopping 80 kilobytes of data– that’s barely enough space to store a single email.
It’s now late 2019, and the United States Air Force has finally phased out 8-inch floppy disks.
Up until now, the Air Force had been using these floppy disks to store data crucial to operating its intercontinental ballistic missile command, control, and communications network!
Click here for the full story.
