Photo by Hello I’m Nik on Unsplash, this article is from WeChat public account:Game Research Institute (ID:yysaag) , author: Capricorn
Recently, according to the US Defense News website C4ISRNET, the US Air Force is replacing the floppy disk it uses to manage the national nuclear arsenal with a “highly secure solid-state digital storage solution” – yes, it will be today The child thinks it is the kind of “save button”.
“The child said: You actually printed a save icon in 3D!”
A 3.5-inch 1.44MB floppy disk (Floppy Disk) What can I install? A not too big mobile phone wallpaper, half of the “Deer Ding Ji”, or one-third of the ordinary sound quality of “say not cry.”
In the era when the game capacity is tens of hundreds of G, it seems that everything has become distant and illusory in the era when the floppy disk was in full swing. It was the earliest removable medium on personal computers. From 1971 to 1996, from the first to more than 5 billion, the floppy disk was once synonymous with “preservation.”
It is hard to imagine that this military system that controls intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear bombers, mainly used to transmit emergency operations messages to nuclear weapons and fire weapons instructions, has been using floppy disks to transmit information.
According to the response of the US military at the time, floppy disks and related science and technology have stood the test of time, and they hope to ensure the highest reliability and performance when operating this critical weapon. This communication system does not have access to the Internet, has no IP address, and is almost impossible to be attacked by hackers. Therefore, even if they are “old”, they are more inclined to use it.
Unfortunately, this rhetoric did not touch the US government. In 2016, the US Government Accountability Office issued a report saying that taxpayers need to spend $61 billion a year to maintain the old technology systems in government departments. As a result, the hardware of these systems is becoming more and more difficult to purchase. Second, the new generation of technical maintenance personnel do not know how to repair these ancient equipment. Compared to investing in modern information technology systems, the cost of maintaining an old system is three times higher.
For the US nuclear weapons force still using the floppy disk of the last century, US Defense Department spokesman Valerie Henderson said: “This system is still in use, in short, because it Can still be used.”
In order to reduce maintenance costs, the US Department of Defense finally decided to upgrade SACCS to modern digital devices, and plans to replace these floppy disks with more secure storage media by the end of 2017.
However, this work seems to be more difficult than they thought. Until June of this year, the 8-inch floppy disk was officially retired from SACCS, and replaced by the already popular SSD.
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Compared with the United States, Japan’s “nostalgic complex” is heavier. According to the Nikkei report last month, in Japan, not only small and medium-sized manufacturing, but even large companies in the automotive field are looking for computer repair shops to renew old computers, including 30 years ago equipped with 5.25 Inch floppy computer.
As mentioned before, the cost of a very expensive production equipment is not short, and the cost of updating tens of millions of yen will often discourage companies. The production equipment is not updated, and the computer it is equipped with does not dare to update it. As a result, “seam stitching for another three years” has become a true portrayal of Japanese manufacturing.
According to the fact-finding survey of the holding period of production equipment released by the Japan Machinery Industry Federation in June, the number of production equipment imported into Japan for more than 30 years has reached 19.1% of the total. It can be imagined that there are still many companies in Japan still using computers equipped with floppy disks.
Although it is barely enough, these old operating systems can’t be updated, and the latest control software can’t be installed. It’s not only difficult to repair, but it’s easy to connect to the Internet.Attacked by a virus. In the long run, upgrading these old computers as soon as possible is the way out for Japanese manufacturing.
The high-welfare Nordic countries may have to upgrade their hardware faster, but probably not much faster. Until 2015, Norwegian doctors received a 3.5-inch floppy disk from the Norwegian Health Authority every month.
In Norway, every citizen chooses a doctor as their daily doctor, and the corresponding records between citizens and doctors are maintained by the government. Since citizens can switch to any doctor who has space at any time, the government needs to constantly send the doctor a list of citizens it is responsible for.
In order to avoid leaking patient information and to save money, the Norwegian government finally chose a floppy disk with a small but sufficient capacity. In fact, until 2016, the Norwegian government gradually began to stop floppy disks, forcing doctors to use the electronic patient note system. Norwegian doctors have finally embarked on the information superhighway.
It’s a natural matter to replace a floppy disk that has already been eliminated, but it is often not easy to implement.
A lot of people may know that most aircraft are using a floppy disk to load the database, and the navigation database files can only be loaded into the aircraft’s onboard navigation database via a floppy drive.
However, the floppy disk has a small capacity, and it is easy to age out after a long time. In order to solve this problem, Shandong Airlines, which successfully implemented the U disk loading navigation database in 2016, has spent a lot of time: