Huge floppy disks and other old tech is common at Air Force nuclear missile silos

You’d probably expect to encounter all sorts of crazy technology in a US Air Force nuclear silo. One you might not expect: floppy disks.

Leslie Stahl of CBS’s 60 Minutes reported from a Wyoming nuclear control center for a segment that aired on Sunday, and the Cold War-era tech she found is pretty amazing. But it also makes sense. The government built facilities for the Minuteman missiles in the 1960s and 1970s, and though the missiles have been upgraded numerous times to make them safer and more reliable, the bases themselves haven’t changed much. And there isn’t a lot of incentive to upgrade them. ICBM forces commander Major General Jack Weinstein told Stahl that the bases have extremely tight IT and cyber security, because they’re not Internet-connected and they use such old hardware and software — via redwolf.newsvine.com