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FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

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Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#181

Post by WalterBright »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #121
WalterBright wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I was designing electronic circuits, the rule was to design for minimum speed, but faster speed should not cause a failure. The rationale was that newer parts were usually faster, and the older parts disappeared. Of course, nothing can prevent poorly designed code and hardware.

The speed thing was just an example that easily came to mind. I can imagine there are other kinds of analog vs digital interactions that might be occurring that may not be easily replicated under emulation. Especially with a system that grew somewhat organically over the last half-century. Emulation is likely possible, probably for many of the systems involved, but this is not a field where bugs, especially ones intr…

These kinds of risks are always present with anything involved with airplanes.

Being terrified of progress means you're likely to kill far more people.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#182

Post by ptero »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #104
ptero wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is definitely value in stability and the US system worked well for a long time, but it is not the only way for a safe ATC. So OK, if you want to do development in this space, do learn about the US setup from a retired old fart who worked with paper strips and thinks the system should stay like this forever. But also learn about systems in Europe, Japan and other places; and realize that ATC can move away from t…

The irony is that the US routinely uses much more capable software for almost identical purposes in domains like battle space management. It isn’t like the US doesn’t have this software, more that the FAA doesn’t consider anything derivative of that tech as an option.

My original response was sharper than I intended; I am aware of both the air-defense and ATC systems for both the civilian and military use (so worked in each cell of that mini-2x2 table). The military is much more tolerant of risks and, even if implementing them would lead to an increase in safety and convenience using military systems for civilian ATC will likely cause all sorts of problems due to differences in training, planning, etc.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#183

Post by WalterBright »

dwood_dev wrote: post #171
WalterBright wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the machine is that old, couldn't an emulator be used to migrate to modern hardware?

I would not be surprised if many of these systems rely on several ISA cards with proprietary protocols and drivers. I am only aware of a single modern-ish motherboard with ISA, the MS-98A9, and it only supports Intel 3rd Gen Core series CPUs. That said, if it was a large enough project, reverse engineering and re-implementing using modern components would likely be feasible. Turning each of these into network service…

I'm sorry, but this just sounds like quitting before you start.

For example, I've looked into emulating DOS, because I don't like the existing emulators. But I don't need to emulate floppy disk drives, or their drivers, or their hardware cards. I just write some software that can fake a disk drive and hook it to the I/O interrupts. That would be a simple project.

There's nothing sophisticated about DOS.

In hindsight, I'm baffled that it took many many years for people to develop clones of DOS.

For example, EDLIN. A trivial program. I'd write it in a high level language like D, get it to work, then hand-translate it to asm. The executable loader is absurdly simple. And so on.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#184

Post by userbinator »

Osiris wrote: post #107
userbinator wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

corrupt itself and need to be manually reinstalled In my experience that's normally the fault of third-party software, and otherwise quite easy to determine and avoid/fix. Now OSes with more protections just hide those bugs, causing most software to regress to a barely-working state. I ran 98SE as a daily driver from late 1999 until 2010, and it was reinstalled at most 3 times, not even coinciding with hardware upgra…

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.

It's stable if you have a controlled environment.

I've seen enough stories of power outages permanently damaging SSDs, that if you have bad power from your utilities provider and can't get them to fix it, then I recommend investing in a UPS.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#185

Post by justsomehnguy »

Osiris wrote: post #107
userbinator wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

corrupt itself and need to be manually reinstalled In my experience that's normally the fault of third-party software, and otherwise quite easy to determine and avoid/fix. Now OSes with more protections just hide those bugs, causing most software to regress to a barely-working state. I ran 98SE as a daily driver from late 1999 until 2010, and it was reinstalled at most 3 times, not even coinciding with hardware upgra…

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.

Or a modem driver reading the stream and writing shit - I still have some of those burping mp3s. But if you blame this solely on the OS then you may be thinking very nostalgically too.

Hell, it most of the time worked on some combo of the cheapest parts - modern systems wont even get to UEFI boot part on the parts of the same quality.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#186

Post by userbinator »

chadaustin wrote: post #158
M95D wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows 95 allowed programs to disable system interrupts. No protection on cli instruction. Careful with those rose-colored glasses.

So what?

ATC systems are definitely not going to have users installing random software at any time.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#187

Post by os2warpman »

The reporting on this has been an atrocious, lazy, embarrassment to journalism (aka: a normal day) so I tried my best to look into it.

As far as I can tell the only systems that use floppy disks are IDS-4 terminals, of which there are a couple hundred left in the US, the rest having been upgraded (to IDS-5 or similar systems) over the last 30 years.

I don't know if it is small regional airports with no money, large international airports with few moments of downtime time needed for the upgrade, a mix those two, bad luck with the bureaucratic wheel-of-priorities spin, or what.

But there's no context to any of these articles, only "FLOPPY DRIVES LOL" so I had to take the time to find out what systems were actually impacted.

I mean, it could have been an old HP Oscilloscope in a RF rack that used floppy drives to store images and log data, or it could have been the Master Control Program of the entire air traffic control network.

There's a slight difference in impact between those two.

It appears as though there are multiple competitors/replacements to IDS-4 so the solution is to cut a check and block off some time on the calendar.

edit: every single journalist who just grabs a couple of tweets, adds some commentary, and dusts off their hands muttering "job well done" should encased in a Lucite cube and displayed in the town square as an object of ridicule.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#188

Post by M95D »

stavros wrote: post #157
M95D wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it uses any digital hardware directly accessed by software (something that Win9x still allowed, see DOS games w/ ISA sound cards), it makes virtualization impossible.

Why is that? Doesn't virtualization virtualize the hardware? I'm not sure why virtualization is impossible there, as QEMU can run plenty of old DOS games.

Yes, but what use is a virtual radar, or a virtual radio?

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#189

Post by skissane »

swells34 wrote: post #169
skissane wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For retrofit purposes, it's probably attainable to use solid state (no moving parts) floppy disk emulators that use USB thumb drives or CF/SD cards instead of error-prone, real floppy disks. Yes, but if it is just a PC running Windows 95, likely simpler to get the software working under newer Windows, or if worst comes to worst, keep Windows 95 and stick it in a VM. I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the…

> I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else. Based on my experience with older government systems, this is likely an incorrect assumption. It was extremely popular in the 90s to create custom hardware that integrated directly to windows machines. I've had to reverse engineer so many drivers to upgrade old bespoke equipment to i…

The reason why I doubt it for the FAA, is I know in the 1990s the core ATC system ran on IBM mainframes and the specialised equipment was directly or indirectly connected to the mainframes. Hence, I expect the Windows PCs were used to run terminal emulators, email/messaging, various auxiliary applications.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#190

Post by viraptor »

fallingknife wrote: post #55
viraptor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that's not how things work in practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain_(computing) If Jepsen fails every database coming from single source, imagine the chaos of synchronising a P2P of various clients of various versions over a very noisy link. We can't even achieve that with home automation meshes that send maybe 3 types of messages! Also you need to handle planes without computers - you can…

We operate cars on the road with not only no centralized system, but also minimally defined and enforced protocol, and yet Waymo has achieved a near zero collision rate inside a swarm of cars that are not running equivalent software. And this is in a situation where cars are only a few feet from each other while operating at top speed. So you can come up with a million objections but they are all solvable. As for aut…

That's a completely different system. In a car everything still resolves in seconds and needs minimal planning -corrections can happen in real time. That's completely different from "there's a queue of planes coming in and you have to manage the throughput available on the ground". You can't just hit emergency breaks on everything and slowly resolve the situation. These things are not comparable.
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