by sleepyshift on 8/10/20, 2:24 PM with 162 comments
by ir77 on 8/10/20, 2:53 PM
i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc.
these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life, so unless these are obsoleted these are to last 20-30+ years.
the costs associated of porting all tools from win 7 to a newer system and re-verifying 50K+ test cases to do a similarity analysis run into astronomical in terms of $ and months (years) of work. no one really wants to poke that bear so you have situations like these.
by mtbnut on 8/10/20, 8:00 PM
Then, in 1995, Raytheon came out with Block III updates, which replaced the entire trunk filled with hardware (about as crowded as a standard engine bay of a modern car) with about 3 PC graphics cards-sized modules, each with an NSN price tag of $170,000 per (don’t worry, you’re paying for the IP, not the physical cards themselves, which iirc were MIL-spec versions of your standed PCI card from back then).
Made my job as a tech so easy, since the launchers never really broke down much after that, save for a hydraulic leak or two out in Dugway or White Sands during a shoot or Red Flag exercises at Nellis AFB. Didn’t see aliens out there but quite a lot of Soviet gear, which we acquired shortly after the USSR’s downfall. MiGs are really cool and reliable, though pilot/user comfort/convenience was not on their MVP list.
by reaperducer on 8/10/20, 3:20 PM
Was it secure? Yes.
So, what's the problem? Updating 30-year-old gear with media from its era seems to make sense.
If they were really wedded to digital media and needed to bridge that gap, Sony used to make a floppy disk that you could jam a memory stick into and it would read in a normal 3½ inch floppy drive. Very cool gadget.
by zdw on 8/10/20, 2:39 PM
It has a great number of hardware mods that give it a display and a rotary encoder for better disk selection: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki/Hardware-Mods
by code4tee on 8/10/20, 3:22 PM
More modern aircraft use things like USB sticks but often with old file formats and they can’t use a stick bigger than 2GB (actually hard to find if you want to buy one). Aviation engineering vastly prefers “old but works” over “new and fancy” and this article is just one detailed example of that.
by inetsee on 8/10/20, 4:26 PM
If the software doing the load is performing its integrity checks to a sufficiently high standard, then I don't see why using a 3.5" floppy disk would be a problem.
by Animats on 8/10/20, 8:41 PM
F-16s still use PCMCIA cards to load combat flight plans. Obsolete, but small and reliable. Also big enough to handle on a flight line while wearing gloves. An SD card would be too small. A USB stick might accidentally get plugged into something it shouldn't be plugged into.
by cpgxiii on 8/10/20, 2:55 PM
by rwmj on 8/10/20, 2:51 PM
by dis-sys on 8/10/20, 2:46 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy...
by notacoward on 8/10/20, 2:41 PM
by raxxorrax on 8/10/20, 2:32 PM
by dekhn on 8/10/20, 3:23 PM
by JoblessWonder on 8/10/20, 8:21 PM
Luckily we convinced the owner to update their avionics and now it uses... CDs? DVDs? A laptop? I honestly don't know. Something that isn't ZIP disks. We also have aircraft that need floppy disks.
by lizknope on 8/10/20, 3:01 PM
by dehrmann on 8/10/20, 4:18 PM
> "Aircraft themselves are really expensive beasts, you know," said Lomas as he filmed inside the big Boeing. "Even if you had all the will in the world, airlines and manufacturers won't just let you pentest an aircraft because [they] don't know what state you're going to leave it in."
by niffydroid on 8/10/20, 4:10 PM
I assume they don't have to go through certification for the loading device(the floppy drive), just the process of loading data instead (through the emulator)
by commonturtle on 8/10/20, 6:45 PM
I read something similar about the computers that control the US nuclear arsenal: They're extremely primitive and can only be updated by floppy disks.
by lm28469 on 8/10/20, 2:58 PM
by ponker on 8/10/20, 8:36 PM
by deeblering4 on 8/10/20, 2:44 PM
by zikohh on 8/12/20, 8:16 PM