You know those little gray squares you click in Word to save a document? That icon is a relic of the 8-inch and 3.5-inch floppy disks that most millennials have only ever seen as a save-button icon; the physical disks themselves went obsolete in consumer computing well before most millennials were born, let alone using computers. Now imagine that same technology residing in a system that distributes emergency orders to America's nuclear forces. According to a 2019 DefenseNews publication by reporter Valerie Insinna, the Air Force's Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) moved off its 8-inch floppy disks to a solid-state storage system in June of 2019. Insinna notes the 8-inch floppy disks are familiar to many after the 2014 "60 Minutes" segment, which highlighted the system that could receive a presidential order to fire missiles from silos around the country. With the headline already being the removal of the floppies, the more interesting question is why such a thing could persist, and what that might say about the US's self-governance in the digital space, not to mention the irony.
Old tech has defenders, and they have a point
