Other than cars, my other big ridiculous obsession is old and woefully obsolete computing devices. If you’re an Autopian Member, you’ve likely seen evidence of this in your second-year birthday artwork, which was generated by a team of me and an old Apple II. It’s also why my attention was grabbed so vigorously and wetly when I saw news stories about how the German Navy is just now planning on replacing the eight-inch floppy disks used in their Brandenburg-class (F123) frigates. Oh, also Saab is involved with all this, though not the part of Saab that made cars.
Now, the idea that a legacy system on something like a battleship still uses floppy disks isn’t really all that shocking: Boeing 747s, for example, still use 3.5″ disks for critical software updates, lots of professional embroidery machines use 3.5″ floppies for storing embroidery data (though it looks like many are getting converted to USB storage), and as late as 2023 critical infrastructure systems like the Chuck E. Cheese animatronic systems also used 3.5″ floppies. Sometimes, if something works, there’s just no need to bother to replace it, and in many cases, floppy disks just still work.
That said, what really shocked me about the German Navy announcement wasn’t just that they were still using floppy disks, but that they were using 8” floppy disks. You may have noticed that all of the examples I gave above used 3.5″ disks, the most recent major iteration of floppy disk technology, small, plastic-encased disks that could store anywhere from 320K to 2.88 MB, depending on the operating system and year. These types of disks were developed by Sony in the early 1980s and first rose to popularity when they were chosen as the default disk format for the first Apple Macintosh (in 400K form) and soon thereafter were used by other major computing platforms of the era, including the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and then the IBM PC standard.
Now, the F123 Brandenburg-class frigate is a warship that was first ordered in 1989 and first commissioned and built between 1994 and 1996, well within the era of the 3.5″ floppy disk’s dominance of the removable digital media space. One would think that if any systems developed for this warship were to rely on floppy disk storage, it would use 3.5″ floppies, which were by far the most common, the most advanced, and the most durable choice at the time.
Eight-inch floppy disks, on the other hand, strike me as a really, really strange choice. Eight-inch floppies were the very first type of removable disk media developed for computers, with IBM pioneering their development in 1971. Initially, these were read-only disks capable of holding 80K, but later development allowed for read/writeable disks, and by 1976 a respectable 500K was able to be stored on an 8″ floppy.
Here’s the thing, though: 8″ floppies are, as you can guess, big. They’re cumbersome. And while they were used on some early personal and business computers, it was soon determined that they were just too expensive and clunky to be really viable for mainstream home computers, and by 1976 the smaller 5.25″ disk had been developed, effectively a scaled-down 8″ design. Just so you can see an example of the difference in scale, here’s a 5.25″ floppy in front of the only 8″ floppy I have, set on my Apple //c:
See? They’re huge. And, by the 1980s, they were definitely in deep decline, with 5.25″ floppies having taken over the general computing disk market. That’s what baffles me so much about all of this. Big 8″ floppies were extremely uncommon in the mid-’80s, and by the time these ships were being built, were almost extinct for most uses. By the time these ships were being built in the early 90s, you would think that just sourcing 8″ media and drives would have been far more expensive and difficult than sourcing 3.5″ media and drives. So, why did they make that choice?
The systems that use the 8″ drives are part of the Saab-supplied data acquisition systems, which have nothing to do with weapons systems, which are also being upgraded.
The Saab systems are part of the ship’s general operating tech, and the goal seems to be to try and update these systems with as minimal disruption as possible. That’s why the request from June to the Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support (BAAINBw) reads like this:
Replacement floppy disk unit
Development and integration on board of an emulating storage system to replace the floppy disk unit for the data acquisition system on board the Class 123 frigates.
They’re looking to make an 8″disk storage emulator, so to the overall system, it looks like nothing has changed. These sort of solid-state storage systems that seamlessly replace disk storage have been a staple of the retro computing world for years; here’s one for old Apple II, Mac, and Lisa computers that you can get for $129, for example. I suspect that whatever gets developed for these battleships will be at least conceptually similar to this.
I just can’t figure out why Saab would have chosen 8″ drives back in the early ’90s, though, and it’s sort of driving me nuts. There are precisely 0.0 reasons that anyone would choose an 8″ system over a 3.5″ floppy system in 1989 – 8″ floppies are more fragile, hold less data, take up more room – none of it makes any sense. Well, it’s possible the F123’s systems were simply updated legacy technology that was developed many years before and used the 8″ floppies. That answer would make sense and would point to these warships’ control systems being based on 1970s tech, which I suppose is possible. If it ain’t broke, as they say.
I find all of this fascinating. The fact that 8″ floppies have managed to find a niche to survive to 2024 is in itself incredible; the fact that this niche seems to have been created in the early 1990s just makes it even more baffling and astounding. I’m sort of sad to see these go, and while part of me wonders if this is the final death knell for the 8″ disk, I suppose I wouldn’t be shocked to find that some mining operation or maybe some ocean desalinator still runs on them. Some things just never really seem to die.
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I fly C-17s. When I started 6 years ago, we still used floppy disks to load some stuff into the jet. Now we have advanced to Compact Discs®!
Thank Gawd I still have that box of 8 track tapes up in the attic. World peace may depend on them someday
Having lived with all 3 formats, I can tell you that 8″ floppies are the least fragile. probably owing to the fact that data isn’t stored as densely. You could drop an 8″ disk on the floor and roll over it with your chair, and it would probably work ok. Try that with one of your little plastic jobbies, or even a USB stick. Granted, they don’t hold as much data. I’ve got an IBM computer in the attic now that uses them, and even an unopened box of new ones. (No, I haven’t used any of them since the late ’90s.)
They can absolutely spec a flash drive to be nigh-indestructible if budget is no object.
Hell, off the shelf you can get ruggedized flash drives that will resist many forms of damage, plenty of which would likely kill any type of floppy disk. And even a $5 one will go through the wash and survive a decent beating just fine.
I can’t roll over a flash drive with my chair because it’s physically difficult to do, but there are plenty of flash drives that would survive a car running over them or whatever.
The reason they haven’t moved to flash drives isn’t because flash drives are less robust, let’s not insinuate for a second that’s even remotely an issue.
Woulda swore I was replying to a post that said 3.5″>5.25″>8″ when it came to reliability, which I disagree with. Capacity and convenience, sure. Was thinking about mechanical damage, of floppies, where 3.5″ is the least reliable. Damaged shutters but also media fragility. Data is probably most secure on flash drives, though USB connectors are fragile. In any case, assume that for the warship they wanted adapters to substitute flash (though I have no idea how well flash holds up in a possibly nuclear exposure).
Ah, okay, gotcha, makes sense with the floppy disk comparison being a top concern. Looks like the comment forum messed that one up.
Yeah, there are probably a ton of reasons but flash drives are fairly robust, so hopefully that one isn’t high on the list.
Pretty sure they have USBs that will survive EMP issues but I will admit that a nuclear event could be a hangup.
At this point they are using such a rare technology, it may actually present some random positives continuing with the ancient tech. Not many people out there with much 8″ disk experience.
Totally agree on 3.5″ fragility, if you looked at one long enough I swear it would go bad. Was a great excuse when submitting essays in school though. Give the professor a hosed disk and you just bought yourself another day at least =P
There is a room in Lockheed Martin that has an old computer with floppy drives. Its sole purpose is to issue commands to the old satellites in orbit over your head.
I still own a working dual drive 8″ floppy drive CP/M computer. I built it myself so my girlfriend could write her college thesis using Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, and dBase. She printed the paper using the “high-quality” mode on my OkiData dot matrix printer.
My diabolical plan worked. She got the advanced degree, she married me, and I’ve been sponging off her inflated salary ever since.
And you want to buy some new floppy disks for yourself, you can get them here:
https://www.floppydisk.com/5point25
“ These sort of solid-state storage systems that seamlessly replace disk storage have been a staple of the retro computing world for years; here’s one for old Apple II, Mac, and Lisa computers that you can get for $129, for example. “
There’s at least one outfit selling a drop-in gizmo for the 80s vintage Fairlight CMI samplers, that lets you use SD cards instead of an 8″ floppy drive.
https://mustudio.fr/fairlight-2/kit-flash-for-fairlight-cmi/
An article about German surface combatants without names like Bismarck and Scharnhorst just feels wrong.
The military has an ultra long procurement cycle. So many of its tech innovations are 10 years old when they are incorporated in a new machine. If you want quirky; some of our electronic warfare, über expensive, like $200,000,000 aircraft still have magnetic core memory (little circular magnet strung on two interesting wires). They are still in service! Now on the plus side, spies have a hard time stealing data. They have to find an 8″ disk to start off with. Then it hardly fits in the heel of their shoe to hide it. The system will not get viruses by scattering USB thumb drives in the parking lot, waiting for some Iranian scientist to plug it into their air gapped system. I suppose you could scatter 8″ floppies in the parking lot, but most folks would use them as coasters under house plants.
No shade meant for Torch — it’s an easy typo to make. (Also, “sloppy disk”)
In the early 90s I worked at a mail order PC company, and one of our PC descriptions included ‘3.5″ flippy disk‘ as one of of its selling points. The typo somehow never got caught in production and the catalog got mailed out to thousands of people. I think I spent the next 8 weeks answering dozens of phone call questions about what kind of newfangled technology a flippy disk was.
That’s better than the nefarious Microsoft Office clippy disk.
That last pic is proof, if proof were needed, of the progress microcomputers (!!) made in the 1980s.
For those who didn’t live through that heady time, note that the 8″ diskette is single-sided: only one side could be used to store data. Compare that with the 5.25″ diskette which is labeled “2S + 2D”, meaning “two-sided + double-density”: one could use that Kodak diskette to store data on one side and THEN FLIP IT OVER to store data on the other side. Amazing.
Note that Torch’s 5.25″ example has a rectangular notch cut into it on the right-hand side. The notch is what allowed the diskette to be used on both sides, so it would have come like that from the factory. However, one could also purchase a cheaper single-sided 5.25″ diskette and then use a specialty tool to cut a notch into it to make it 2S. The rumor was that some diskettes were shipped as 1S because the second side did not pass quality control, so using it to store data was risky, but I don’t know if that was strictly accurate.
Specialty tool? Heck, we just used those hand-held hole punchers to double side our disks!
IIRC, you can’t write to that 5.25″ disk if you flip it over as it’s missing the write notch on the other side.
That’s what hole punchers are for.
Depended on the supplier. Especially later in the 5.25″ life, they used the same production line for the magnetic media regardless of whether it went into single sided or double sided disks. With early disks it may have been an issue, but later on the hole punch trick never failed, at least in my experience.
My reply is to the comment that “labeled “2S + 2D”, meaning “two-sided + double-density”: one could use that Kodak diskette to store data on one side and THEN FLIP IT OVER to store data on the other side.”
You can’t flip a disk without the notch on the other side and expect to be able to write to it.
Ah. I see your point. Classic case of two monologues do not make a dialogue. Sorry I misunderstood.
A DSDD disk has media on both sides, but requires a drive that has recording heads on both sides to go with it. You don’t flip them. But IIRC there were notch cutters that you could use to turn a (SS?) disk into a flip disk, if you weren’t too concerned about errors.
In the mid-80’s, while in the Army (coincidently while stationed in Germany), we used many 8″ floppys for our Wang word processors. Meanwhile, I was using a cassette tapes drive on my Commodore and thought I was hot stuff when I finally got a 5 1/4″ drive.
If your 5 & 1/4″ floppy is better than an 8“ Wang, then it just goes to show, it’s what you do with it ..
When they put this boat on the used frigate market, they will describe it as “quirky,” and “yes, the key is still between the front seats.”
The US Air Force was using 8″ floppies in missile silos until 2019.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a29539578/air-force-floppy-disks/
General Electric BWR Series boiling water nuclear reactors, up through model BWR-6, allrgedly still run on Digital Equipment PDP-10s, there’s over 30 of those in the country
Speaking of Saab’s marine products, one of these would be pretty cool:
Docksta Interceptor Craft 16 | Saab
In the 80’s, the German spy who originally stole the weapons control system for this ship from the Russians tried to smuggle the 3.5 inch disk out of Russia by sewing it into the lining of his briefcase. The thickness left a slight bulge and the spy was caught and executed.
The next spy did the same thing but with a skinnier 8” floppy and sailed right through security. Mystery solved.
Just glue an old tablet to the helm and call it good. Problem solved.
They could have upgraded, but there’s a certain whimsy to the 8″ floppy that just really tickled the Germans.
https://i.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExendwNnZjYnNla2l2ZHBmMHhheWYzZWNkbTJvOGR4d2QzZGJ2bTVvbCZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/kfznTxem5HG0w/giphy.gif
We used 8″ floppies on the TRS computers at my middle school in NC ~ 1982. When we went to Jr. High we switched to Apple ][+s and 5.25 floppies. I remember the glory of punching an additional read notch on them and being able to use both sides of the disc.
Given Cold War concerns, EMP resistance was part of the considerations. 8″ floppies had probably been tested, but not 5.25 or 3.5. Or higher data density on the 5.25/3.5 caused them to not pass the EMP testing.
Towards the end of the space shuttle program, NASA was sourcing replacement chips off of eBay since the old tech was better resistant to space radiation and they didn’t want to spend the money qualifying newer technologies.
The only 8″ floppy I ever had came with the syllabus for a class in programming Pascal at UCSD in 1976, using a DEC PDP-11.
The maximum storage capacity of today’s micro SD cards (> 1 TB) is incredible in comparison.
Used to use 8″ floppies on pdp 11’s running Berkley 2.something I cannot remember. Also had a few running rsx-11. Used to store os builds on them when we were genning a new os build for the system in question. IIRC they were about 120 or 180 k. So long ago the rust has wiped the records.
The IBM System/36 line of mid-sized computers mostly used 8″ hard sector floppies for backup and for OS installation. There were floppy drives with a mechanical cassette system to switch between floppies and reduce the need for inserting singles. I actually managed one of these up until the early 90s – we bought the thing in the late 80s. I’m not surprised at all that a hard to upgrade military system still uses those things.
I’ve come across several tools in my career that still use floppies. I always enjoy seeing it.
Might I suggest using Warship instead of Battleship? Battleship refers to a specific type of warship (like the Iowa, Arizona, Hood, Bismarck, Yamato, etc) while warship is generic.
I suppose the German Navy could go to one of the German automakers for its updated computer systems. What could possibly go wrong?
Look, the servo linkages for the machines to “wake up” and the LED light sequence are truly a sight to behold. But the linkages are a bit intricate and any failure in the system, even for just a cosmetic function, will fail the overall startup function and require a full replacement.
Man, I just hope German warships don’t have to pass emissions….
While the ships were ordered in 1989, if the German Military procurement process is anything like the US (and given the closeness to the cold war, I suspect it was) these ships started development at least a decade earlier.
For a satirical look at just how bad it can be, I recommend The Pentagon Wars, it’s got a great cast and i a real eye opener on the US Military Industrial Complex.
Edited to add, that the above doesn’t touch on the validation requirements for military applications, especially in the 1980s. All military hardware has to be validated to requirements, for MTBF and lifespan; and the process for such a thing probably was the duration of the development program for these ships. Changing out to a different drive would have invalidated all of that work and delayed the project years… This is speculation, but it’s a lot harder to “just use the new one” with the types of requirements and validation these systems go through.
I used to build training systems and simulators for the military and it drove me absolutely nuts when they’d issue an RFP that specified outdated computational technology because that’s what they were familiar with. You could argue until you were blue in the face about the advantages in performance, efficiency and cost of updated or state-of-the-art solutions, but they wanted what they knew and if your proposal didn’t exactly answer the mail, you didn’t win. So, we’d bid what they spec-ed knowing that somewhere in the process they’d get a clue and want the good stuff, which meant engineering changes. Real expensive changes that they’d then happily pay for and we’d collect. Ever wonder where the biggest cost overruns come from? Now you know.
As someone that works in the capital equipment industry, this all sounds familiar.
Officially, development started in 1989, with construction of the lead ship beginning in 1992, however, Blohm & Voss did draw on ideas from the cancelled multinational NFR-90 frigate program that was under development or discussion between 1979-1990 as well as prior experience with the Bremen class , which was designed in the mid/late 1970s and built between 1979-1990 (in commission 1982-2022).
As someone who has lived his life working in technology, I find the development times of systems like these fascinating. I think a big contributing factor was when this was happening as technology was moving faster than it ever had before, and things like military logistics and planning was far out of sync with the pace technology was moving. Most of the big systems I’ve been involved in had an expected lifetime of 5 years, at best…
Never served in the Navy, but would think that when you are building something to get shot at, emerging tech is not something you want to include/rely on. I was born in 79′ never used any 8″, but we were still using 5.25″ floppy’s in elementary school in the late 80s to play Oregon Trail.
That was the answer I was given when I asked the same question regarding the sonar station on a 688 fast attack sub.
(Little did I know that sub had already been earmarked for decommissioning.)