R.I.P. Scout26
As we alarmingly learned in 2014, the US military has been using 8-inch floppy disks in an antiquated '70s computer to receive nuclear launch orders from the President. Now, the US strategic command has announced that it has replaced the drives with a "highly-secure solid state digital storage solution," Lt. Col. Jason Rossi told c4isrnet.com.
So long as the launch computers aren't connected to the internet, I don't care what they use.
"highly-secure solid state digital storage solution,"
Ya mean a thumb drive?
I don't understand why organizations use severely outdated tech like that in potentially mission critical situations. Sure, it works, for now, and there may be an insane process to update to more modern stuff but damn.Even big Telco does it in really stupid situations, there are more than a few cases where telephone switches are still managed with 5-1/4" floppy drives. the real kick in the pants is the lack of either ability or desire for corporate procurement to actually buy new disks.
I am sure the military has a much cooler name for it.
Technology has moved way past that kind of equipment, but most of it is manufactured in countries that are not friendly to us. Remember when China was back-dooring modems?
PED-SRSM
Translation?
While the vast, vast majority of consumer electronics are produced in our favorite communist country, I think we would both be supprised to learn how many domestic outfits produce finished electronic assemblies and components here. There's a lot of silicon still being done in the US. One non-chip company has a microchip fabrication lab right here in KC. I've got a friend that works in an outift making capacitors, made in the US. We have the capibility to domestically produce systems to modernize this process - as other posters said, I suspect it's more of a bureaucratic mess.
So does anyone produce an all USA home computer?
Not that I'm aware of. It would probably be a poor business choice for a company; consumers wouldn't pay the increased price for it. Other countries win for producing volume consumer electronics stuff at the lowest unit cost.
Yeah, that defacto slave labor really cuts down on the overhead. Not to mention the cost savings Inherent in not having to deal with pesky things like worker health and safety.