You are not watching some scene of an old movie. It is today's working of US Nuclear Facilities. According to documents recently released by the US Audit Chamber, most of the nuclear arsenal of the country are still running the old computer, created back in the 70s of the last century. It's hard to imagine it, but the American system of nuclear weapons are being controlled by a computer IBM Series / 1, running on an 8-inch floppy disk. Intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads, nuclear bombers, and many other appliances depend largely on the physically and morally obsolete computers.
If you are surprised that the Pentagon is still using such ancient "Mammoth", you will be surprised even more when you know that technical support for this and many other outdated computer technologies annually costs US taxpayers $ 61 billion. This figure is three times higher than the costs that the government spends on the maintenance of works of modern computer systems. What exactly makes war "blind eye" to the current state of affairs? What prevents them from upgrading their computers to the current models? Well, the answer to these questions is simple: They don't want to change the systems as it may involve some risks. Security concerns is another reason for not upgrading.
Let us for the sake of interest we compare the technology of the US Nuclear Facilities and today's home computers. At the 8-inch floppy disk, we can store 237.25 KB of data, and a modern 32-gigabyte flash drive will fit more than 130 000 of these disks. If you add as many diskettes in one pack, it will raise a tower of 200 meters.
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