Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
theregister.com
Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
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Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#2And I feared they would use 5¼" floppies, those were terribly unreliable.
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#3While this probably wouldn't pass muster with whoever certifies the 747's avionics, over in the retrocomputing world the solution to "It only uses floppies" has been the cheap Gotek floppy emulators that read from a USB stick running this free firmware: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy
It has a great number of hardware mods that give it a display and a rotary encoder for better disk selection: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki/Hardware-Mods
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#4The headline is misleading. According to the story text, the floppy is used to load a new navigation database, which is important to be sure but not a critical software update.
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#5How many 747s are still in operation? I thought they were being phased out
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#6US nuclear weapons relied on 8 inch floppy disks until 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy...
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#7How many 747s are still in operation? I thought they were being phased out
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#8And I feared they would use 5¼" floppies, those were terribly unreliable.
When 3.5" floppies (stiffies) were introduced, the big selling points were that (a) they could fit in a shirt pocket and (2) you could toss them across the room and they'd still work.
At my first job, I kept a 5¼" floppy with "only copy of important data" written on the label hanging off my filing cabinet with a magnet.
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#9And I feared they would use 5¼" floppies, those were terribly unreliable.
When 3.5" floppies (stiffies) were introduced, the big selling points were that (a) they could fit in a shirt pocket and (2) you could toss them across the room and they'd still work. At my first job, I kept a 5¼" floppy with "only copy of important data" written on the label hanging off my filing cabinet with a magnet.
They were before my time, but I had an old drive I "examined" (destroyed) as a kid. It was unclear to me how such a large thing could hold so little memory.
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#10The Panavia Tornado fighter jet famously used cassette tapes for mission data. I guess aircraft are a product of their time and because of stringent safety requirements why try to update something if it works fine?