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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