Comment on German Navy to replace aging 8-inch floppy drives with an emulated solution for its anti-submarine frigates

Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• deegeese@sopuli.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Design started in 1989 so I can understand 3.5” was a little too bleeding edge, but 5.25” had been standard for years.

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  • ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And the 8" were probably the cheapest.

    So, as always in government, you get the minimum that satisfies the contract.

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    • dgmib@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The old 8” floppy disks were more expensive but known for being incredibly reliable.

      The newer 5.25” and 3.5” floppies used cheaper and mass produced coatings on the magnetic surface, plus the smaller and higher density tracks had less surface area per byte and less material to hold the signal.

      The net result was the newer floppies often couldn’t be reliably read after a few years of use.

      It’s not at all surprising they stuck with the more reliable system for so long.

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    • Korkki@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It might have been selected just for reliability sake. That is how especially militaries usually want them. better to have a tested lesser product of the last gen, than to have the current gen wild card tech that may or may not have a intolerable amount of bugs and problems that could in a combat situation get the ship wrecked and the crew killed.

      as always in government, you get the minimum that satisfies the contract. This is true. That is what you get when you combine governments nearly unlimited budgets with private profit seeking and very little to no oversight. It’s either audit the private contractor in everything all the time or have some state company or institution do the product or service for you.

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  • Buelldozer@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    but 5.25” had been standard for years.

    For civilian use but perhaps not in the West German Military. I say West Germany because the ships were ordered in June of 1989 and the Berlin Wall didn’t come down until November.

    Europe in general, and Germany in particular, had some very peculiar technology quirks and companies back then.

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    • r_deckard@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I was system operator for an IBM System/36 in the mid-late 1980s and that thing used two 10-slot magazines of 8" floppies for backup.

      It was replaced in 1989 with an AS400 that used half-inch tape.

      And that backup solution was replaced with an LTO library.

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• dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I feel like zip disks would have been a worse investment, so maybe they dodged a bullet here. Those drives were not built to last, and there might actually be more 8" media around than zipdisks these days. IMO, this article would have cropped up a long time ago were that the case.

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• IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I graduated college in 1990 and one of the places I interviewed for a job was with the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics. They build the submarines for the US Navy.

  During my interview they told me that the computers on the current generation of subs were programmed by punch card. The punch cards were sent to the one contractor that had the ability to convert them to the magnetic tape actually used to load them onto the subs systems.

  Perhaps by now they have indeed upgraded from punch cards & mag tape to floppy disks of some sort…

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  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I saw some CNC controllers in the 90’s that were loaded up using paper tape - essentially punched cards but in a tape format.

    The admins said they had to load a machine maybe once a year, so no reason to switch to anything else.

    These things ran non-stop for years at a time, in a rough environment. They had added some kind of networking (not sure what back then, may have just been a serial connection) so they could send jobs to specific CNC machines using a desktop on the network.

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• Fondots@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I believe when talking about naval ships, commissioning is when they enter active service, so construction probably began early 90s, maybe even late 80s, and probably a few years of designing, bidding, etc before that. And of course there were probably all of the usual idiot politicians, bean counters, stubborn assholes, sales people, etc. involved who pushed for older tech. Maybe because everything else they had worked on the old disks, maybe they were skeptical of the new tech not being robust or tested enough or wouldn’t catch on, maybe it was just cheaper, etc.

  I’m willing to bet that they somehow locked themselves into using 8 inch disks in the early to mid 80s if not earlier, when the 5¼ discs were still new-ish and the 3½ were brand-new or not even available yet.

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  • Buelldozer@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You nailed it. The contract was awarded in June of 1988 and the ship was being designed in 87/88. That means the targeting system was almost certainly designed in 85/86. A time when 8" floppies were still prevalent in Industrial, Commercial, and Military systems.

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