Leading the world in technology and ecological transit.. on 3.5"
Leading the world in technology and ecological transit.. on 3.5"
SFMTA's train system in San Francisco is not only relying on humans to run it, but turns out that a floppy disk has been playing a key role for decades.
If the system is working, what's the big deal? Is not like this needs to be running on windows 11 with the ability to send out tweets and Instagram posts. Relying on floppies may seem archaic but it's better than spending $10B and years of 'project delays' just to wind up with a functionally similar system using modern hardware.
As long as they can still get floppies to replace them as they go bad I don't see a problem. They're still being made for things like old geological and industrial equipment and will continue being made for a while.
They aren't being made anymore - people are just reselling old hoarded stock
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-standing-in-the-floppy-disk-business/
There'll probably be no more diskette makers in the future, so the train operator should stop using diskettes. I did a quick googling.
In January 2024, Japan announced it will no longer require floppy-disk copies of government submissions.
I did a quick search on amazon.com too. You can buy diskettes there.
I'm assuming the folks doing the upgrade know what they're doing. Train operation is key, so to be sure, they may need to slowly move away from diskettes and slowly integrate ssds or whatever the replacement will be.
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
Aaaand that's when I stopped reading. Please, we had hard-drives in average office systems for more than a decade at that point.
I'm trying to justify that in my head, but the only idea that I have is that "old" hard drives couldn't handle the vibrations of a train. But flash existed even back then, and floppies aren't exactly known for their high capacity.
Flash (NOVRAM or EEPROM as it was called at the time) did exit, but it was expensive, tiny capacity, and had astonishingly few write operations (compared to today) before it couldn't be written to again. Some of the early stuff could be written (reprogrammed) as few as 1000 times and only had capacity of about 20KB.
An interesting thought, that the author of that article is younger than me, possibly like 5+ years younger. And I'm only a bit under 28. Scary how it ticks.
Yeah they're over a decade off from computers that didn't come equipped with one by default.
Haha, that was literally the exact same point I stopped reading. I have emails older than this system and they weren't stored on floppys 😂
First several generations of hard drives really were awful and broke if you stared at them at them wrong. Floppies were more reliable, cheaper, and easy to get.
By 1998? No, hard drives were standard and reasonably reliable by then. Floppies were headed towards the end of their lifecycle with a high failure rate due to cutting costs.
I'm not sure what time you talk about, but it must be before 5,25" 20MB MFM drives and 30 MB RLL. Which were way more reliable than floppy disks and diskettes. These drives were available in the mid 80's.
Maybe you are mistaking a few bad blocks that were allocated out in the allocation table, for being unreliable?
Maybe they meant home computers, and that's all most of their audience will picture in their heads, anyway. But yeah, not a very good computer historian.
Home computers had hard drives by then. This was after Win95 was out.
I still love the concept of floppy diskettes. Sure, some of this is nostalgia, but what if you had something like super fast solid state memory encased in a nice solid shell like that? Sure, sure, like a USB drive...but the contacts could be protected with the little slidy-shield bit and nobody could accidentally snag the USB sticking out and damage it and the port.
I think I just really miss the "kaCHUNK" of inserting physical solid media, and flipping through stacks of them...maybe not so much the capacity or read speeds :)
It's not solid state though. The disk spins.
Edit: Oh, you were saying "we could have a nice tactile solid state storage option", not saying Floppies were. My bad.
That feeling was so good.. better than that loosie goosie 5.25 literal floppy bullshit having to flip the latch and whatnot.
Something like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5O4w6AASqM
It's a bit rough around the edges but it works.Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=R5O4w6AASqM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Ah yes, the stone age of 1998, "an era when computers didn't have a hard drive".🤦🤦🤦🤦
Thinking about cost effective solutions, like running it in an emulator on modern hardware with disk images instead of floppies. They’ve probably gone and spent millions on replacing working sensors and writing all new software though.
Thin computing and VMs are still expensive migration, especially something this proprietary I'd imagine
If they blow through a shitload of money and end up with a worse product then it will be easier to claim that public transit is worse than a metric fuckload more cars on the road.