FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems
1–10 of 197 posts
Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems
#2For 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. Every time a floppy drive moves over a sector to read or write, it wears that area mechanically. Magnetically, bits just seem to rot from floppy disks randomly with time more likely failure mode for previously good floppies.
Let me complain you about how error-prone and unreliable are real floppy disks. ):
Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems
#3Would you like to trust your life win95 and floppies definitely no but paper strips is something really robust and in light of crowd-strike or the outage in Newark I think a truly independent backup ‚system‘ is a good idea. Particularly as the next system will come with some early bugs.
Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems
#4> While this likely saved them from the disastrous CrowdStrike outage that had a massive global impact
I imagine log4j wasn't a problem either.
Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems
#5So what does a modern ATC look like?
can winehq save the day in the interim or in the transition?
Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems
#6The latest "Last Week Tonight" episode on Air Traffic Controllers is quite interesting. Learned about the floppy discs there.
Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems
#7> This is the most important infrastructure project that we’ve had in this country for decades. Everyone agrees — this is non-partisan. Everyone knows we have to do it.
Considering the current political climate and rampant government cuts to important services, I very much doubt “everyone agrees” and that this is the best time to be planning such an important transition.
Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems
#8For 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. Every time a floppy drive moves over a sector to read or write, it wears that area mechanically. Magnetically, bits just seem to rot from floppy disks randomly with time more likely failure mode for previously good floppies. Let…
> 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 Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else.
The use case where physical floppy emulators really shine is with much more exotic legacy systems. Some years ago there was a furore that the US nuclear arsenal was still being managed using 8-inch floppy disks (used in IBM Series/1s, 16-bit minicomputers from the 1970s). USAF was proud to publicly announce they’d successfully transitioned the US nuclear arsenal to be floppy-free. I don’t know if they said publicly exactly how they did it, but I suspect they kept the Series/1 minicomputers and just replaced the 8-inch floppy drives with hardware emulators (which probably each cost an utter fortune when you add up the premiums anyone will charge for it being the military, being highly classified, and above all being related to glowing things that go boom)
Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems
#9For 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. Every time a floppy drive moves over a sector to read or write, it wears that area mechanically. Magnetically, bits just seem to rot from floppy disks randomly with time more likely failure mode for previously good floppies. Let…
> 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 guess these hardware emulators are quite cheap on aliexpress, but then obivously for anything critical...
Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems
#10A first step to mitigate some of the risk would be to move the
system to a virtualised system. This could be in each location
or more centralised which would make the maintenance of the
fleet of old computers easier.
Floppy can be copied to hard disks and will not have to worry about failures of mechanical parts involved in reading floppy drives.
Developing a brand new system would take quit a lot of time. As all systems du if they need extreme uptime. Starting that effort now is ok but I would guess it would be take at leas a couple of years. Significant work would have to understand in detail what the current system does and does not do, and then map out what a system should do.