I worked on an air-defense system upgrade (ground and airborne radar integration) 1981-1986 where we installed 8" floppy drives. At the time they were being installed, they were already obsolete. The backstory on this includes (A) The goal is to have the system be operational at least 20 years. (B) the procurement cycle is about 10 years long from "we need this" to "it's operational". You want to decide on your hardware at about year 3 in the procurement process. (C) You know your hardware won't be supported by commercial vendors for this length of time, so you need to develop an Integrated Logistics Plan (ILP) that includes complete troubleshooting, maintenance and repair processes (manuals written from scratch). We were replacing card readers with 8" floppy drives. Wee! The systems described here far outlived the planned-for 20 years being operational.
Same here. Worked on Mystic Star and radio programming was on 8 inch floppies well beyond 20 years of operation. The network still exists but many of the sites were decommissioned.
