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.
Sure computers had a hard drive, but it was the style at the time to remove them and use them as lifts in our shoes. You could tell who the poors were because they walked with a limp on account of only having one computer.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
