The Air Force finally replaced 8-inch floppy disks, used since the 1970s.



The floppies were used to help broadcast emergency action messages issued to nuclear forces.

As comically obsolete as the old system was, advocates said it was unhackable.

The U.S. Air Force has finally replaced its ancient 8-inch floppy disk drives. The drives, cutting edge technology during the Gerald R. Ford presidential administration, were used to help send out emergency action messages to U.S. nuclear forces worldwide. The disks, which are as wide as a sheet of typing paper, were replaced with solid state drives (SSDs).

The 8-inch floppy disk drive was invented by IBM in the late 1960s as a replacement for punch cards. The disks were hailed as a breakthrough in storage , capable of holding the same information as 3,000 punch cards. Each was a plastic disk covered in magnetic material and permanently sealed in a plastic protective jacket. The floppy was inserted into the drive where it acted like a hard disk. The first 8-inch floppies could hold up to 80 kilobytes of information. By comparison, a single three minute song compressed in mp3 format is about 3,000 kilobytes, and a typical 1 terabyte personal computer hard drive can store 1,073,741,824 kilobytes.

E-6 Mercury airborne command post. "Balon Greyjoy" Wikimedia Commons

The Air Force knew the system was old, but it also knew that it worked reasonably well and was integrated into a time-tested system. U.S. nuclear forces have also taken a backseat in funding for the last three decades, as the end of the Cold War reduced tensions among the nuclear powers.

The floppies serve the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) emergency action message system. Emergency action messages , or EAMS, are voice communications sent in the clear distributing coded messages to America’s worldwide network of strategic nuclear forces. The messages are sent out by the National Command Authorities and major U.S. military commands, relayed through E-6 Mercury airborne command posts, and forwarded to nuclear forces.

Here’s an example of an EAM:

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Source: C4ISRNet.com

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