Museum-worthy 8″ floppies still in use with US nuclear weapons system

Who still uses 8″ floppy disks? Hardly anyone will pull out those old floppy disks for home use, but it turns out that the US military relies on an IBM Series/1 computer for its Strategic Automated Command and Control System for the nuclear forces from 1976.

That a Series/1 computer still running on 8″ floppy disks controls nuclear weapons systems came to light after a report by a committee of inquiry into the United States’ IT budget was published on May 25. For fiscal year 2017, a $89 billion budget requested for maintenance of IT systems, much of which is spent on maintaining legacy systems.

The Government Accountability Office, which conducted the investigation, discovered interesting samples of systems still in use, such as the IBM Series/1 systems that coordinate the operational functions of US nuclear weapons systems. This includes intercontinental, ballistic missiles and nuclear bombers. The plan is to give the system a major upgrade in 2017.

The IBM Series/1 is a 16-bit mini computer introduced by Big Blue in 1976. The US military was one of the major buyers of this computer. IBM even built a special, portable variant of this system.

In addition to the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Finance also uses old systems, namely 56 years old. It concerns systems that calculate the refund of taxes and the programs are written in assembly language, practically machine language. The ministry says it has no plans for an upgrade.

The latter immediately reveals another problem with old systems; there are not that many programmers who can handle the various older programming languages, such as Cobol.

8″, 5.25″ and 3.5″ floppies (source: Wikipedia)