https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-train-system-has-been-running-on-floppy-disks-but-city-fears-catastrophic-failure-before-upgrade/14624828/
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.
That's probably the real driver here behind the push to upgrade and the article. Some grubby, underqualified company wants a giant contract with little responsibility to deliver a working product.
It is actually much worse than that. The problem they are having is that street-running LRT trains get stuck in traffic, causing bunching and other scheduling issues. The obvious solution is to get cars completely out of the way of the trains. But despite an official "transit first" policy, the SFMTA won't do that. So instead they will spend >$100 million on a new signal system, which will map train locations in real-time simply to tell dispatchers what they already know -- that the trains are stuck in traffic.
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/
Ohhh, good info! I didn't realize. Well, that's gonna suck for a lot of people in a lot of industries sometime soon.
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.
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 😂
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.
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.
In 1990 I bought my first (very used PC) which had a 20MB hard drive in it. I In 1996 I upgraded my home computer to the largest consumer hard drive available 1.6GB.
For reference, a floppy disk pictured hold 1.44MB.
We had hard drives in home computers there too.
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?
HDDs before, say, 1986, were junk. Those that came after will still very expensive until the late 90s, when prices started to drop.
Incidentally 1986 was the year I got my first hard-drive. ;)
And yes they were absolutely expensive in the mid 80's. The first 20MB MFM i bought was almost $1000 USD. This was in Europe, prices were probably lower in USA.
But I worked as manager for a computer shop, and the 4 years I worked in that, we only had 1 defect under warranty.
I remember it clearly, because it was a woman coming in with her computer saying her hard-drive was defect, most people being somewhat ignorant of computers, often called the whole computer hard-drive, and since defects were rare, I obviously thought she meant the computer. But no she actually knew what she was talking about, and she was the unlucky one to get the only defect hard-drive we ever delivered! OK my memory may not be perfect, there may have been others, but it certainly wasn't considered a problem in general.
But I remember I heard about defects, very old Seagate drives could get stuck, if that happened, I was told you could tap them against the table flat down, and that would often resolve the issue!!!
Apart from that, I was much more confident with drives back then, because you could actually hear if they were going bad, as the drive would make a suspicious sound in its attempt to calibrate and reread, with a surface scan you could see if they were actually going bad, or it was just some unusual file operation. Generally in time to switch to another drive before actually losing any files. There may be some truth to drives being more unreliable back then, but they were (so to speak) more unreliable in a more reliable way.
Today this functionality is hidden in the SMART system, which I find unreliable. Drives reallocate bad blocks themselves keeping the user ignorant, until suddenly they are completely dead.
I agree with it being nice to be able to hear how they were doing. But it’s nice now to manage a thousand computers.
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.
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.
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.
Thin computing and VMs are still expensive migration, especially something this proprietary I'd imagine
In other - insert retro vibe - news, 1/30/2024, 7:00 PM, Japan may get rid of its dependency on floppy disks in the near future : https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/floppy-disk-requirements-finally-axed-from-japan-government-regulations/