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Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

theregister.com

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Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#121

Post by crispyporkbites »

echelon wrote: post #119
mtbnut wrote: post #106

I worked in HAWK missiles in the Marine Corps for many years. This doesn’t surprise me one bit. In 1994, Block II launchers were still effectively using vacuum tubes. In fact, I still recall the one that faulted the most, from its label in the FM: relay K-9! Ninety-percent of launcher issues were attributed to that old relic of a tube. Then, in 1995, Raytheon came out with Block III updates, which replaced the entire…

> each with an NSN price tag of $170,000 per This is why we don't have decent public health care. That's obscene.

not really - how many software and hardware engineers do you think you need for this? probably minimum 10, maybe 20-30 realistically. At SV salaries (you need the best engineers, right?) that's $9m USD/annum.

You need to ship at least 50 of these devices to break even. To get a proper margin and cover all the other costs (manufacturing, sales, marketing, compliance, accounting, yada), you're probably going to need to create and sell a couple hundred, every year.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#122

Post by recursive »

tantalor wrote: post #47
ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

Why not just virtualize it and use whatever hardware you want?

The hardware probably has to be tested just the same. I don't think that gets you anything, except more complexity and more testing.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#123

Post by tempsolution »

hindsightbias wrote: post #34
ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span? Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.

Is it interesting? Most software is just about shipping stuff quickly and replacing things with the next big thing. Most normal projects are maintained and updated on the fly as they mature, until they become abandoned and die. Without this throwaway approach, we would still be stuck with technology from 2000 at best.

Nobody can afford to develop software that lasts this long without constant maintenance, bugfixes and updated. We are not NASA. And if you look at the costs and development time of projects that require things to last this long... It's astronomical. Any market opportunity would be old news by the time you shipped, and any venture capital you might have gotten would have been sunk into the early planning phase.

I have been part of several projects from start to finish and you just keep getting surprise ALL the time. There isn't a single decision you can make that doesn't need to be revised a few months later. Planning all of this upfront is close to impossible and a reason why the costs of doing it are insane. This can work better in other environments, like Aviation or Space Travel, since things are more predictable than building a webserver for a changing customer base and feature set. Still, even there costs are still astronomical and innovation moves at a snail's pace.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#124

Post by Animats »

So? There's nothing wrong with diskettes as a medium. They're not used much any more, but they work OK.

F-16s still use PCMCIA cards to load combat flight plans. Obsolete, but small and reliable. Also big enough to handle on a flight line while wearing gloves. An SD card would be too small. A USB stick might accidentally get plugged into something it shouldn't be plugged into.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#125

Post by outworlder »

Animats wrote: post #124

So? There's nothing wrong with diskettes as a medium. They're not used much any more, but they work OK. F-16s still use PCMCIA cards to load combat flight plans. Obsolete, but small and reliable. Also big enough to handle on a flight line while wearing gloves. An SD card would be too small. A USB stick might accidentally get plugged into something it shouldn't be plugged into.

> but small and reliable.

PCMCIA cards may be. Floppy disks are not reliable at all. But I assume there will be safeguards in place.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#126

Post by [deleted] »

Animats wrote: post #124

So? There's nothing wrong with diskettes as a medium. They're not used much any more, but they work OK. F-16s still use PCMCIA cards to load combat flight plans. Obsolete, but small and reliable. Also big enough to handle on a flight line while wearing gloves. An SD card would be too small. A USB stick might accidentally get plugged into something it shouldn't be plugged into.

[deleted]

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#127

Post by outworlder »

gspr wrote: post #71
alfalfasprout wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, provided you have error checking logic and don't store them next to a magnet... floppy disks are pretty damn bulletproof. I've had way more issues per-use reading a thumb drive or a CD/DVD-ROM than I ever did reading floppy disks.

Really? I'm not doubting you, but I'm surprised. I only used them up until I was maybe 10 or 12 years old, but I still vividly remember often having to go through a couple of floppies from my drawer to find one that was working. And yelling at my little brother for putting a bad one back in the drawer. Are they really that robust? Was I just storing them stupidly maybe? Or maybe it was because all the ones we had wer…

> Are they really that robust?

Not very. There's significant wear and tear from the drive head, to the point that you could see it with the naked eye after a while.

If you are not using them frequently, storing under ideal conditions, than maybe. I've been able to read floppies a decade after they were written. Not for long though. Drive required cleaning afterwards too.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#128

Post by iso1210 »

hindsightbias wrote: post #34
ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span? Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.

I have stuff I wrote 15 years ago still in daily use from 500+ people to produce news which is seen by tens (hundreds?) of millions of people, last serious development on it was 2012, written in perl of course. Another system a colleague wrote from the same time, written in PHP, looks after image archives. I don't believe that's changed much either.

There's a lot of infrastructure stuff that dates back 12 years, when we standardised the entire place on ubuntu (804) for linux (and got rid of solaris at the same time).

That's all fairly new though. A lot of broadcast equipment still in use store config on 3.5" floppy disks, and I saw a windows 3.1 machine still running in a branch office about 18 months ago.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#129

Post by helb »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #89
alfalfasprout wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, provided you have error checking logic and don't store them next to a magnet... floppy disks are pretty damn bulletproof. I've had way more issues per-use reading a thumb drive or a CD/DVD-ROM than I ever did reading floppy disks.

I found a box of old floppies... the media had become unglued from the metal center ring. Maybe other brands use better glue to make them bulletproof, these were not.

On the other hand, that was probably pretty easy (or at least possible) to fix, if you really wanted or needed to…

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#130

Post by jacquesm »

hindsightbias wrote: post #34
ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span? Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.

Some stuff I wrote in the 80's is still up and running.
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