Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks • Hacker News Board

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#151

Post by WWLink » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 6:02 AM UTC

pyuser583 wrote: post #149

hindsightbias wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 used to work for a manufacturers that had industrial equipment that was 15 years old. We had 15 year old PCs to talk to it. That was about 20 years ago. From what I hear, they’re using the same equipment, and same PCs.

35 years means they must be using 286s to run that stuff. On the plus side, nothing requires fans, the motherboards are extremely simple (albeit a mess of logic chips), and your biggest worry is probably the power supply. Right?

I dunno. I could easily see taking decently made hardware to the 20 year mark.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#152

Post by jjav » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 6:50 AM UTC

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,…

> i'm surprised that people are surprised by this.

While I'm not surprised per se (seen it enough here and in the industry), it does make me sad and worried about the industry.

This short-term thinking is starting to break everything. How many things sold today depend on some smartphone app? What is the chance that said app will be available or able to run in ten years? Thirty years? I'll bet big money on zero percent chance.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#153

Post by detaro » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 9:05 AM UTC

owenmarshall wrote: post #102

detaro wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a single comment in this comment section seems surprised by this - so probably a large percentage.

Self selection bias surely doesn't apply to software developers.

True of course. I just found the contrast between "people don't think in those scales" and the comment section interesting - and generally think that a surprising amount of code survives for a decade or more.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#154

Post by nix23 » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 9:06 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #131

Osiris wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built a relatively simple system over 10 years ago that ran on PHP and MySQL. Over the years, the company I built the product for has come back to me to upgrade PHP and MySQL after a security scan. The problem is the software was build for PHP 5.4, and they want it running on the latest (7.4). It doesn't. I managed to get it running on the latest security release of 7.1 with a few days of work (I had to make code c…

I charge my proofreaders a euro every time they miss 'built' spelled as 'built'. It's been a pretty steady money maker, that one. I make a ton of spelling errors as well so who am I to cast that particular stone but the built-with-a-t one seems particular hard to get rid of even when you know about it . Must be some cognitive blind spot.

>Must be some cognitive blind spot.

Hehe, yeah for the better or the worst ;)

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#155

Post by rleigh » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 10:14 AM UTC

MrDOS wrote: post #117

gspr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have similar memories from around the time when USB sticks started gaining popularity. I think floppy disk manufacturers started slacking off on QA through the last few years of large-scale manufacturing. They certainly didn't used to be that bad.

The final years of 3.5" floppy manufacture were bad. I think the quality was tailing off from the mid nineties. But it could equally be poor quality of the drive manufacture as well.

Certainly 5.25" floppies from the late 80s and early 90s were nearly bulletproof in my experience. 1.2MB was a bit flakier than the 360KB though. All were still perfectly readable 20 years later, though at this point they all got thrown in the bin due to their obsolescence!

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#156

Post by sheepybloke » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 1:01 PM UTC

blahyawnblah wrote: post #50

tantalor wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The hardware itself may be the issue. Even com ports over usb don't work a good amount of the time

Yes. I do some DoD Aerospace work, and we have expensive PCI cards that only work on Windows 7 or XP that are used to talk MIL-1553B to our hardware. So, we've got to have a piece of hardware that can handle both of requirements which can be a pain.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#157

Post by sheepybloke » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

crispyporkbites wrote: post #121

echelon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

One other thing is that launchers and other boxes that control weapons are DAL-A equivalent, so you have to be rigorous about your requirements and testing to ensure that a missile never accidentally fires. This drives up development costs as well, since you have to do a lot more work to verify and validate the system.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#158

Post by RhysU » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 1:07 PM UTC

ISL wrote: post #38

hindsightbias wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The best-practices we teach our experimental physics students, whether they know it or not, are generally designed to yield experimental apparatus that can last a decade or more with minimal maintenance. After you've lived through it, a decade is a very short span of time. If you don't have to think about whether or not something is going to break, you have more free cycles to think about something else that needs do…

Do you have any materials that you can share about these practices?

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#159

Post by chopin » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

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've written PLC code in the 90's which still runs today.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#160

Post by JAlexoid » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

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.

It's not ephemeral - when you think about upgrade cycles and deprecation of tech.

What I would claim - is that people who targeted Win95 for equipment that had to last decades never bothered to understand how software ecosystem works. They just "threw it together"...

That said - the floppy disks isn't that bad, per se. I would have expected Boeing to be smart enough to expose a data loading interface, that can read something "as if it was a floppy disk"... But then I look af 737 and Boeing's failure to deliver a crew space launch vehicle - and get reminded that they only exist because US government literally props it up.