141–150 of 197 posts
If it works, then don't change it. I would trust a floppy-powered Windows 95 system over the horror show that passes for common operating systems in 2025. What will they think of next? Adding AI to the ATC system?
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> For anyone considering doing development in this space, sign up for a 20 hour instrument flying ground school, preferably one taught by a retired old fart rather than a 25 year old “instructor” with no actual experience. That's a bit overkill in the world of DOGE. They'll just use some AI to design a system by a bunch of 20-somethings that have no experience whatsoever. Then, they'll come here and brag about it.
Nobody even mentioned DOGE
> “Big news,” Duffy said in a 5 February post on Musk’s social media platform, X. “Talked to the DOGE team. They are going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system.”
> Musk himself responded by saying that DOGE will make “rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system”.
[0] https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/elon-musks-institution-d...
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> If it works, then don't change it. As the article points out: the hardware is at risk of physically failing and it’s getting harder to replace like for like. That’s the reason for looking at an upgrade. Hell, even turning the machines off to replace them is a challenge since some systems need to run 24/7!
If the machine is that old, couldn't an emulator be used to migrate to modern hardware?
If it works, then don't change it. I would trust a floppy-powered Windows 95 system over the horror show that passes for common operating systems in 2025. What will they think of next? Adding AI to the ATC system?
I read some years ago - IIRC the letters pages of BYTE, which dates it - about a critical factory control system in a company somewhere running on an IBM XT. The MFM drive had started to show some errors, so they got in touch with IBM, who being IBM, did not have any drives in stock (they'd stopped making them 15 years previously), but could retool a manufacturing line and make some. They offered to do it for $250k/d…
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Or of just a power outage or driver causing a loss of write back cache. 95 and 98 and ME crashed on a regular basis. I specifically remember upgrading from ME to XP and being so happy with the massively improved stability of the NT kernel over the 9x kernels. If you think that's 9x was stable and reliable, you may be thinking very nostalgicly.
Win9x was stable and reliable. It was the drivers that were not. WHQL wasn't invented yet. I'm sure ATC systems were properly tested, including the drivers. Don't compare that with cheap consumer PCs that we had.
Aside from that, the upgrades to this critical infrastructure should be resistant to hacking and other vulnerabilities They should realise that, unlike e.g. USB drives or SSDs or even HDDs[1], floppy disks are dumb raw media and cannot contain any "hidden" behaviour, and the failure modes are well-known. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735424
CD and DVD can fill this role though. It's a damn shame optical media progress cranked down like it did.
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Maybe. The problem is that you don't want to have to deal with that maybe in some applications.
Why hasn’t someone come along to manufacture and sell floppy’s to these industries for $15 each? Or even $50? Seems the market has demand, at least in the mid-term.
2. There are floppy emulators that replicate the functionality of floppy drives with flash
3. The above two probably absorb all of the demand today, but even if they didn't, the volume is so low that fixed manufacturing costs per unit could likely push unit prices well beyond even $50. The tooling for factories often costs millions and unless you are selling in high volume, you will have quite a high fixed cost per unit.
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> I remember feeding disk number 27 out of 33 only to get a "bad sector" error an hour into a software install. I'm still salty about that one. That's why mission-critical systems have several sets of floppy disks, and disk-multiplication stations. > Would you? Really? Or would you recoil in horror at the very idea? Depends. If the old system is certified and has all error modes defined, while the other new system is…
> How many lives would you have extinguished I’ve worked on life & death Citrix modernisation projects several times: the local equivalent of the 911 emergency phone call centre and then computers on wheels used for during paediatric surgeries. A help line for suicidal children too. People conflate the usecase with the technology, assuming that “important thing” must have some mystical properties that requires legacy…
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If the machine is that old, couldn't an emulator be used to migrate to modern hardware?
Not necessarily. For example, if there is custom hardware used for communications with other systems, such as radar for example, there might be specific timing and latency requirements that could be difficult to meet under emulation. The most recent Dolphin Emulator post referenced a bug they had where memory cards were written to too quickly under the emulator (and even on actual hardware if you had memory cards tha…
Anyway, a long time ago, in a physic lab class, we had a custom spectrometer device that was controlled using the printer port. (Probably a light, a detector, a diffraction grid and a steppers motor, and perhaps some weird card as an interface to the computer.) It was controlled by a custom Pascal program in the DOS command line.
It was connected to a Win 95 computer that died and we had to replace it with a Win 2000 one. The problem is that anyone can read/write the printer port in Win 95 but that's not possible in Win 2000. [1] We had to make some magic, probably rewrite the program and use some weird device driver to write to the printer port (IIRC again). And multitasking messed the timing. At the end it worked, but upgrading the computer was not easy.
[1] If that makes no sense, replace that with a Win 3.1 to Win 95 transition, but I think it was not that old.