Leading the world in technology and ecological transit.. on 3.5"
Leading the world in technology and ecological transit.. on 3.5"
abc7news.com
SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure' before upgrade
33 comments
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Turns out that in 1998, SFMTA had the latest cutting edge technology when they installed their automatic train control system.
"We were the first agency in the U.S. to adopt this particular technology but it was from an era that computers didn't have a hard drive
Aaaand that's when I stopped reading. Please, we had hard-drives in average office systems for more than a decade at that point.
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I'm trying to justify that in my head, but the only idea that I have is that "old" hard drives couldn't handle the vibrations of a train. But flash existed even back then, and floppies aren't exactly known for their high capacity.
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Flash (NOVRAM or EEPROM as it was called at the time) did exit, but it was expensive, tiny capacity, and had astonishingly few write operations (compared to today) before it couldn't be written to again. Some of the early stuff could be written (reprogrammed) as few as 1000 times and only had capacity of about 20KB.
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Yeah they're over a decade off from computers that didn't come equipped with one by default.
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Haha, that was literally the exact same point I stopped reading. I have emails older than this system and they weren't stored on floppys 😂
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An interesting thought, that the author of that article is younger than me, possibly like 5+ years younger. And I'm only a bit under 28. Scary how it ticks.
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Maybe they meant home computers, and that's all most of their audience will picture in their heads, anyway. But yeah, not a very good computer historian.
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Home computers had hard drives by then. This was after Win95 was out.
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In 1990 I bought my first (very used PC) which had a 20MB hard drive in it. I In 1996 I upgraded my home computer to the largest consumer hard drive available 1.6GB.
For reference, a floppy disk pictured hold 1.44MB.
We had hard drives in home computers there too.
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First several generations of hard drives really were awful and broke if you stared at them at them wrong. Floppies were more reliable, cheaper, and easy to get.
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By 1998? No, hard drives were standard and reasonably reliable by then. Floppies were headed towards the end of their lifecycle with a high failure rate due to cutting costs.
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I'm not sure what time you talk about, but it must be before 5,25" 20MB MFM drives and 30 MB RLL. Which were way more reliable than floppy disks and diskettes. These drives were available in the mid 80's.
Maybe you are mistaking a few bad blocks that were allocated out in the allocation table, for being unreliable?
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Ah yes, the stone age of 1998, "an era when computers didn't have a hard drive".🤦🤦🤦🤦
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Thinking about cost effective solutions, like running it in an emulator on modern hardware with disk images instead of floppies. They’ve probably gone and spent millions on replacing working sensors and writing all new software though.
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If they blow through a shitload of money and end up with a worse product then it will be easier to claim that public transit is worse than a metric fuckload more cars on the road.
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Thin computing and VMs are still expensive migration, especially something this proprietary I'd imagine
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In other - insert retro vibe - news, 1/30/2024, 7:00 PM, Japan may get rid of its dependency on floppy disks in the near future : https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/floppy-disk-requirements-finally-axed-from-japan-government-regulations/
33 comments
If the system is working, what's the big deal? Is not like this needs to be running on windows 11 with the ability to send out tweets and Instagram posts. Relying on floppies may seem archaic but it's better than spending $10B and years of 'project delays' just to wind up with a functionally similar system using modern hardware.
How is going to integrate with copilot in this state tho?
That's probably the real driver here behind the push to upgrade and the article. Some grubby, underqualified company wants a giant contract with little responsibility to deliver a working product.
As long as they can still get floppies to replace them as they go bad I don't see a problem. They're still being made for things like old geological and industrial equipment and will continue being made for a while.
They aren't being made anymore - people are just reselling old hoarded stock
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-standing-in-the-floppy-disk-business/
There'll probably be no more diskette makers in the future, so the train operator should stop using diskettes. I did a quick googling.
I did a quick search on amazon.com too. You can buy diskettes there.
I'm assuming the folks doing the upgrade know what they're doing. Train operation is key, so to be sure, they may need to slowly move away from diskettes and slowly integrate ssds or whatever the replacement will be.