A 5 ¼ disk (top) and its successor

New Delhi, Sept. 1: When in North Korea, compute as North Koreans do — or at least claim so.

A clerk and his boss at the Indian external affairs ministry found themselves scratching their heads a few days ago when they opened a packet despatched from the country’s embassy in Pyongyang, the capital of the reclusive communist country.

Inside was a floppy disk, supposed to be carrying some information Delhi had sought. Glancing at the disk, the officials endured what now looks like a jolt to India’s pride in its information technology prowess.

The floppy was a 5 1/4 (five one-fourth) disk that was discontinued in most parts of the world by the early 1990s and replaced by 3 1/2 (three and a half) disks. However, even the 3 1/2 floppies are now obsolete, having been elbowed out by pen drives and compact disks.

Now that India is a computing big boy, officials in Delhi couldn’t find a single computer with a disk drive that could read the archaic floppy sent to them.

The officials had a bigger worry: what if the disk was infected and affected other systems? Hacker attacks, especially those blamed on Chinese operators, are a recurring nightmare for those running the Indian government’s computer systems.

So wary is the foreign ministry of such attacks that last week, it issued an exhaustive advisory to all its missions on ways to prevent malicious content from entering their computer networks.

Asked about the outdated disk by officials back home, the Indian mission in Pyongyang claimed that only outdated computer technology was available in North Korea.

It is not clear if the embassy was falling back on an all-season excuse as communist Korea usually attracts adjectives such as “destitute” and “creaking”.

According to published but unverified accounts, ordinary North Koreans do not have access to the global Internet network, but are provided with an Intranet service that features domestic news, an email service and censored information from foreign websites.

“It is indeed rare. I would believe that the MEA’s (ministry of external affairs’) missions, wherever they may be, should also have the kind of modern computers that they have here,” said B.J. Srinath, a scientist at the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). Srinath was surprised as he said the type of floppy disk sent from Pyongyang was phased out in India by the late 1990s.

However, true to the style of infallible bureaucracy, the Indian mission had the foresight to send a hard copy featuring the information that Delhi had sought.

The good old hard copy landed up today. Last heard, the MEA’s clerks were busy scanning and painstakingly retyping the documents so that they can be filed away in presumably more modern storage devices.