The US Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) has reportedly replaced the ancient eight-inch floppy disks it uses to store data on the US nuclear arsenal.
Defense news site C4ISRNET today cites officers from the Air Force 595th Strategic Communications Squadron – the unit that actually manages the system – in reporting that earlier this summer, the antiquated IBM floppy drives were replaced with what was described as a "highly-secure solid state digital storage solution."
Those eight-inch floppies have a capacity of 80k worth of data and were developed back in the 1960s. Today, the smallest USB thumb drives hold 4 gigabytes. And they're way faster than magnetic disk drives at R/W retrieval and storage.
Less expensive, too.
The upgrades are long overdue.
