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SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

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Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#71

Post by jcgrillo »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #4

>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 so you have to load the software from floppy disks on to the computer," In 1998, most personal computers already had hard drives [0]. From Wikipedia "The…

Why would a hard drive be better? If the floppy fails just grab another off the shelf and try it (surely they have more than one copy). Downtime measured in seconds.

The other good thing about the floppy is it can't hold very much code. So the system has a tight upper bound on how bloated and complex it can get. Simpler systems are more maintainable.

These things seem like great assets for maintaining critical infrastructure.

EDIT: Another great thing is such a system will be stateless. No disks, no filesystems, no databases. Sign me up.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#72

Post by deathanatos »

compuguy wrote: post #65
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #4

>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 so you have to load the software from floppy disks on to the computer," In 1998, most personal computers already had hard drives [0]. From Wikipedia "The…

I have this feeling that they meant 1988 instead of 1998 ....but I could be wrong? Edit: Even the news article hints at 5 inch floppy disks...which makes 1998 make absolutely no sense to me at least. https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-train-system-has-been-run... .

I'm not sure moving it back a whole decade saves them?

My family's first PC in 1987 had a hard disk. The Wikipedia quote they provide lines up with that, and provides a more authoritative point of when it was introduced.

And yeah, the "5 inch floppy" quote paired with a photo of a diskette. God only knows what actual hardware the system uses. But point being … the journalist doesn't seem to have found out.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#73

Post by deathanatos »

jcgrillo wrote: post #71
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #4

>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 so you have to load the software from floppy disks on to the computer," In 1998, most personal computers already had hard drives [0]. From Wikipedia "The…

Why would a hard drive be better? If the floppy fails just grab another off the shelf and try it (surely they have more than one copy). Downtime measured in seconds. The other good thing about the floppy is it can't hold very much code. So the system has a tight upper bound on how bloated and complex it can get. Simpler systems are more maintainable. These things seem like great assets for maintaining critical infras…

While nothing you've said is wrong, that's not their point.

(These days, you could also replace the floppy with a USB drive: they make adapters/emulators.)

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#74

Post by bdamm »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #36

> This system was designed to last 20 to 25 years. SFMTA's director Jeffrey Tumlin said upgrading the system will take another decade and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the problem, not that they're using a floppy. This isn't web dev where you get to rewrite everything every 6 mos. Systems have to have decades long life cycles BUT THEY EVENTUALLY NEED TO BE REPLACED and that's not happening quickly eno…

Nah.

What's really happening is going to be: Emerging new use-cases and rising costs from specialized vendors for replacement parts that match the existing system are driving a desire for the agency to replace the control system. The floppy system bit can 100% be replaced with a solution that isn't a floppy, but that wouldn't help them with the rest of what they want.

"because life cycles" is a lazy description.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#75

Post by kion »

markus_zhang wrote: post #45
HumblyTossed wrote: post #36

> This system was designed to last 20 to 25 years. SFMTA's director Jeffrey Tumlin said upgrading the system will take another decade and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the problem, not that they're using a floppy. This isn't web dev where you get to rewrite everything every 6 mos. Systems have to have decades long life cycles BUT THEY EVENTUALLY NEED TO BE REPLACED and that's not happening quickly eno…

I'd like to see a breakdown of that "hundreds of millions of dollars" and which companies provided the quotes, plus who owns the companies and who are their husbands/wives/uncles/nephews/nieces/etc.

I looked into this last year, a significant part of the cost is in new hardware, both on the vehicles, but also sensors spread through the system. They all need commercial grade RF systems that allow for 2 way signaling communication and integration into the vehicles control systems.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#76

Post by gojomo »

Remember when, less than 3 years ago, SF projected a $108M surplus for the next two years?

Woulda been a nice time to clean up some of this technical debt!

Or how about the SF Emergency Sirens, taken offline in late 2019 for a "2 year" upgrade plan that officeholders implied was already in place?

In August 2023, with no progress whatsover, with the Maui fire disaster fresh on their minds, Mayor Breed & Supervisors President Peskin touted they'd finally funded a plan to return them to service soon: https://www.sf.gov/news/mayor-breed-and-board-president-pesk...

In that same August 2023 timeframe, Peskin said the plan would bring this "need to have" system "up and running" & to "state of the art" by end of 2024, for $5.5M: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-city...

Of course, this was just more blatant self-exonerating bullshit from our local political machines immune from any real accountability for incompetence in basic public functions.

A mere 6 months later in February 2024, nothing's been started, Peskin admitted "we don't even have a plan", the department is still waiting until "funding is identified", and the cost estimate has ballooned to $20.5m: https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-sirens-emergency-911-aler...

That works out to $170K+ for each of 119 units – units that each could probably just be a weatherized consumer-grade handheld device with multiple mobile/packet/sat radios, & a simple authenticated-playback app, mounted on existing poles that presumably already have power and even loudspeakers.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#77

Post by JTbane »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #48

> "It's like if you lose your memory overnight, and every morning, somebody has to tell you hey 'this is who you are and what your purpose is what you have to do today,'" said Maguire. Yeah, that's called a cold boot. Moving to not-floppies doesn't mean you can avoid this. Clearly it's off of floppies instead of ROM so you can more easily update the software, but I am wondering how often that ended up happening. Mayb…

Couldn't the city set up a private WAN for the trains, avoiding the security issues of being connected to the internet?

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#78

Post by inferiorhuman »

abeppu wrote: post #2

Frustratingly, though the article goes into how replacing/upgrading the whole control system will be an big, expensive project, they don't attempt to say why they can't just update the "read from floppy" part of the system to read the same info from a modern component.

Floppies aren't the problem, the main problem is lack of support. The MTA moved off of OS/2 back in 2008. Yeah, halfway into its intended lifespan Alcatel/Thales basically stopped supporting the whole mess. If I had to guess they're using an equally unsupported version of Windows now.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#79

Post by inferiorhuman »

pessimizer wrote: post #19
nvahalik wrote: post #7

I don't understand. The retro community has proven reliably that a simple Raspberry PI can easily bit-bang floppy controllers. We have myriad floppy-to-SD card adapters. Surely a plug-and-play solution that removes the area of most concern (reliance on the media itself) should be easily achievable in a few months?

> However, budget challenges put the project's timeline into question. The SFMTA's train upgrade project isn't just a migration off of floppy disks but also a "complete overhaul of the current train control system and all its components, including the onboard computers, central and local servers, and communications infrastructure," Roccaforte said. > Much more critical than the dated use of floppy disks is the system…

You don't need more "bandwidth than an old AOL dial-up modem" for train control. What Roccaforte left out is that the MTA spent over a decade trying to keep the trains from slicing up the inductive loop. No idea how the new trains are working out, but I'm pretty sure they never found a permanent fix for the old ones.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#80

Post by Workaccount2 »

My company provides new compute modules for another major global city's infrastructure that still relies on Intel CPU's from the early 80's. That is, we are building them brand new boards populated with chips that are over 40 years old.

They haven't shown any interest in updating the system. It works, they can get service, and get "new" replacements for things that go bad.

What they might not know though is that there is basically just one engineer we have (and probably the only one on Earth) who knows how to work on these things. He's getting old, and obviously none of the younger engineers really have an interest in learning ancient forgotten systems.

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