Cybersecurity

Department of Defense still uses 8-inch floppy disks and other disturbing details from Jared Kushner's speech

The globetrotting head of the White House Office of American Innovation broke his cipher-like silence on Monday to offer a stunning outline of the federal government's recidivistic tech tendencies.

Chief among them is that the U.S. Department of Defense still uses 8-inch floppy disks, a stored media technology retired by most businesses back in the early 1980s. At my first job at a tiny weekly newspaper in 1986, we used 8-inch floppies and a Digital Equipment Corp. system to back up the paper’s terminal-based production system. 

Even then, it was considered comically out of date and was rapidly supplanted by desktop computers and the smaller 5.25-inch floppy. By the mid 1990’s we were all using 3.5-inch media, and then CD-ROMs. Today, we store in the cloud.

But not the U.S. government. Pockets of it, according to Kushner, who delivered most of the stats in an unemotional monotone, are using systems that are between 39 and 56 years old.