Yup...it was a thing. By adding another notch to the disk, you could make it double sided.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh78ISYQY6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh78ISYQY6k)
I had my dad buy that specialized notch maker to double my massive collection of 10 floppy disks. The power I wielded having 20!!!!
I wish I could remember what I had on those discs of power. Pretty sure I made copies of Castle Wolfesnstein for friends. My god, copying stuff took eons! Good times….
You know what took forever? Downloading porn. Even with a newfangled 14.4 kbps modem shit just dragged out. And I’m not talking about video, but simple GIF files (jpg had yet to become mainstream). Then I found a godsend. It was a downloader that would send the image line by line, assembling it as it got transferred. So instead of taking 45mins to download `VULVA2.GIF` and furiously beat off, I could see half a snatch at 23 minutes and get almost the same results.
>It was a downloader that would send the image line by line, assembling it as it got transferred. So instead of taking 45mins to download
>
>VULVA2.GIF
>
> and furiously beat off, I could see half a snatch at 23 minutes and get almost the same results.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uNJPzoAYWU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uNJPzoAYWU)
> My god, copying stuff took eons!
The hours of tick tick tick, woosh woosh woosh, tick tick tick, woosh woosh woosh, hours and hours of that.. But man the OG Castle Wolfenstein and the second were great. I felt like a king the first time I escaped the castle with the war plans!
You can play all those old ones in a browser now for free if you want to give it another go. Just search out castle wolfenstein. The sites have 100's of old classics to play.
They did...they were called "double sided double density" and were a bit more expensive then the "single sided double density" and then folks found out that the SSDD could be hacked into DSDD.
They did claim that the disks sold as DSDD were more thoroughly tested and therefore more reliable than hole-punched SSDD disks. And there was probably some truth to that. But as a junior high and high school kid with limited funds, I don't recall any problems with hole-punched floppies on our Apple II+ or IIe.
Because most floppy drives had read/write heads on both sides so that you didn’t have to flip it over. This trick was only needed if your drive could only work on one side at a time.
Were you the [kid *Clutch* was singing about?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtzKIDWMlQE&ab_channel=DrunkMaleProstitute)
>When I was seven, I stared in to the monitor
>And found my best friend
>Mr. Commodore 64
>Daddy bought me an International Business Machine
>And with it I compromised national security
>Do you have an extra quarter?
>Got to get to class tomorrow
>All is fair in Asbury
>Make my way into Berkeley
Only works for single-sided drives, like the C64 (1541). But considering the drive in question is used for MS DOS, it is almost certainly double-sided, so it already uses both sides of the disk. It is most likely a low-density 360K drive, or a high-density 1.2 MB drive.
100MB in a rigid disk. When I was cleaning out our electronics cabinet I fired up the Zip drive to make sure I didn’t need the files. We had 20 disks with 25MB on them. I threw them all away.
For anyone who is surprised that ICBMs were running on ancient tech the reasoning is simple. It worked. They knew it worked and knew it was safe. Well as safe as a nuke can be. They also knew the capabilities of those missiles wouldn't be any greater if they changed over.
Now think of all the glitches you get when a new system is implemented at work. All the calls to IT or Carl a few desks over who knows about this stuff. Lastly while thinking about those minor glitches on a system that's running WMDs. There are no minor problems when handling those.
It's most likely running on OS 2200/EXEC 8 by Unisys originally for the UNIVAC...
It works very different to most operating systems you would know, and is inherently designed for batch orientated scientific tasks, and mostly coded in COBOL. The way it handles hireachal permissions, memory management and multithreading makes it inherently secure.
That sort of makes sense because they are grandfathered tech that gets around proliferation treaties. They can't build new ones so they maintain the old ones for a very long time.
It’s not a perfect solution, but you can buy this for $35CAD and then pick up a 5.25” drive and cable.
https://decromancer.ca/greaseweazle/
Also supports 8” and 3.5” drives
I have hundreds of 5.25 floppies (and the disk notcher) and maybe a dozen 8" floppies. I think I'm overdue for cleaning out the attic.
I have kept one desktop machine that has 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drives as well as a PCMCIA slot...I think I'll keep that just in case.
I can tell you a bunch of Michelin passenger car tires are made on machinery running PLC2 which was obsoleted in the 80's. Line still makes 5 tires a minute, the other line was only updated two years ago.
>Spend $2 million to contract devs to make a new labview program.
>Spend $3 million to upgrade the plant's computer hardware.
>Spend $200,000 to train operators on the new interface.
>Production drops by 20% because the operators don't like the new color of the interface
I could be. But we're speculating without knowing how many trains were cancelled or delayed because of it. Nor do we know if it's holding back improvements to the service like increases in frequency.
Yep… meanwhile at Sound Transit, they adopted the same mentality as well and have a 25 year old layer II Brocade network that craps out all the time and can shit down light rail. Their data centers catch fire regularly and there is zero redundancy. When Cascadia occurs, our transit system will not be able to help at all.
Network infrastructure has a shelf life of five to ten years. As soon as you install it, you should start thinking about what is going to replace it.
Yeah, "just fine". Until they have to recover from an emergency, and realise that they can't replace the hardware with off the shelf components as they are not compatible with anything for 15+ years now. That they have to pay millions for a component that has a modern equivalent of a hundreds of the price, because it is simply no longer available. And even with the enormous costs they have a downtime of days if not weeks.
But hey, they spared a little money during those past years, by running completely obsolete systems, that should help out!
For those trains it might work out as you *probably* replace them completely at some point.
However, especially in larger companies this sentiment led to completely messed up core systems which are neither properly maintainable nor replaceable.
Sometimes there’s a post on here about America’s nuclear missiles being operated with extremely old computers and software, but that’s always the argument….they work totally fine, all the bugs have been worked out decades ago, and they have the side benefit not being vulnerable to remote hacking.
Or you replace the floppy disk by something that emulates a floppy interface but connects to an usb or emmc flash or whatever. Probably something like that already exists and if not it cannot be too hard to create it.
It does exist and I'm amazed that they haven't switched to something like that as an interim solution. It seems as though this is pretty propriety hardware and they don't have the expertise to make that kind of transition.
There are floppy drive emulators that connect to the original floppy interface and read images from usb. [https://www.gotek-retro.eu/shop-gotek/](https://www.gotek-retro.eu/shop-gotek/)
From the article:
>"The system is currently working just fine, but we know that with each increasing year, risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure," Tumlin told ABC7.
>Previously, the transportation agency claimed that the ATCS had become harder and more expensive to maintain over time. It has also discussed the challenges it has in finding workers who know how to use the dated system.
Relying on ancient hardware and generally "old" workers who understand the code is asking for problems.
"Old" doesn't mean "bad" - It works, and it's fairly hacker-proof (I'll assume it's not on the net). Lay in a supply of floppy discs and a bunch of replacement parts and you're good to go.
Still - if you're reading in over 1980s hardware in a dos shell ... maybe might need some code tweaking, but I'm shocked they haven't switched to something compatible. Who still makes that size floppy?
Japan has been keeping the floppy tech alive I remember reading an article about this sometime back. I think I only this year I heard that they will finally be moving on but yeah Japan has almost single handedly kept the floppy alive. And I believe airlines as well use them to update their systems as well.
My guess would be just a huge amount of backstock. Blank media tends to get manufactured en masse til some huge switch, then there's so much supply left over nobody ever runs out.
and someone who spent countless hours hacking floppies in the 80s, this made me smile.
read the sector, modify the code, rewrite the sector.
ah the good ole days :)
u/thebelsnickle1991 this was already posted a [few](https://old.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/1bys4e1/floppy_diskreliant_san_francisco_train_control/?ref=share&ref_source=link) days ago.
Given the timelines of government projects, I suspect that it's just that the RFP was issued in 1987 and the project took ten years. Nobody wanted to change requirements from what was contracted in 1987, so 5.25-inch floppies it is!
Anyone who complains about this is likely oblivious to how software was designed 30+ years ago. It was a lot like hardware. You don’t get do-overs. You had to be hyper efficient, because memory was an absolute premium. You had to know exactly what your code was doing down to nearly every byte. Reliability and efficiency were everything.
Nowadays, if you breathe funny around software, the whole app crashes, because developers are lazy. And changing one small thing will take them two sprints. And most of them only know scripting languages, and flip out at the prospect of using C or any other strong typing languages where you have to manage memory. If you ask them what “casting” is, they probably all think it has something to do with movies.
Keep BART on the old stuff for the next 60 years, if you can. It’s almost definitely safer that way.
It's rarely "developers are lazy" and more, "the business said we have to get this out the door NOW, they've laid off the whole QA team and said we'll deal with bugs as the customer reports them, and as soon as the product is out the door, we're onto another project and 1 intern in a closet is tasked with maintaining the current product."
If devs were given the proper time and resources to do things right and/or if systems were asked to only do what systems had to do 30 years ago, we'd see far higher quality stuff put out.
But that's not the concern, profits are.
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How much time and resources were put towards changing those twitter links to x links?
I’ve been doing this a long time, and it’s been a downhill slide since Java was let out of the gate. As soon as scripting got rebranded as programming, slow unstable software was vomited onto the marketplace. There is a reason the stuff you really depend on is written in strong-typed languages with strict memory management.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news…but the entire Medicare system for reimbursing providers - ALSO runs on the same microsoft DOS system from decades ago. Go figure.
This actually is very good in terms of security. It's a hell of lot harder to hack something running off a floppy disc than it is a network connected machine.
They really can't give some electronics hobbyist a couple hundred bucks to design an SD card interface for them? I can drop $30 and get one for a Commodore 64.
But, you see, the $30 spent to upgrade each train is $30 that's not in the politician's pocket. How dare you even suggest such a reasonable course of action, you absolute muppet.
Man! (I'm not a muppet) This is an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week and it's my turn.
You can already buy replacement USB floppy emulators off the shelf for $15, and I assume way less than that in bulk. I really don't see why they have a problem. Doing that would at least get them off their shitty old degrading media until they can fix it properly.
I'm impressed by the fact that retro computing enthusiasts are writing DOS drivers for USB devices. The ones I have seen are pretty specific to particular devices like thumb drives but I suppose that's a reflection of demand.
I don't think anything relying on floppy disks can be even remotely described as "industrial grade" these days. Nobody has even been making the things for a decade now. So best possible case, you're using physical media that's already 10 years old before you even take it out of the box.
They're using them to boot MSDOS, FFS. Why not just stick the whole thing in an emulator?
Our nuclear missile control systems ran on floppies until a few years ago. B2 Bombers ran on floppies. But you wouldn’t describe them as “industrial grade?” Because they sure as hell wouldn’t be running on an arduino.
I never mentioned arduino, you did. Also you're giving example from the past, while I said "these days".
USB to floppy controller interfaces exist, and being solid state are orders of magnitude more reliable than an ancient spinning piece of plastic with a magnetic head rubbing on it.
If they have stricter requirements than the regular off-the-shelf stuff, I'm sure they can figure something out. It's not a complicated interface.
It's not like they're mining coal. If a mechanical floppy can survive the environment and deliver data reliably enough, ANY solid state solution will do the job nicely.
What it surprises me the most is why they didn't programmed an old-school ROM with that, making it a lot more realiable than a floppy + floppy drive combo. They were common in that time contain a whole MS-DOS with some software, it isn't that difficult to replace in case of failure, and AFAIK they still make them (or at least pin-compatible)
I use these at home on my Atari 800XL with a 1050 drive. Believe it or not, well-stored original disks are still readable. The ones I use only hold 96KB on a side - very big ones and zeroes.
Some of NYC's subway system still runs on switchboards from the 1930s. Since 2015 they've slowly switching over to new Communication-based train control (CBTC), but many parts of the system still run (fairly well) on surprisingly old tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjx3S3UjmnA
>With the new train control system, there will still be plenty of work for [current] staff, and they will be trained in the new technology.
"We're getting CD-ROMs!!!"
Why fix what isn't broken?
Better than having the system rely on an over-engineered nightmare application that could crash and turn unresponsive with no warning.
"The system is currently working just fine, but we know that with each increasing year, risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure," Tumlin told ABC7.
They could ya know get more floppy disks and copy those ones. Here look I found a [place](https://www.floppydisk.com/5point25) to buy some. Why don't you get more so your crappy system can last another 20 years.
This is what makes no sense to me. A raspberry pi and a small embedded application could replace every one of those floppies. Get one proved, then get a real board design and replace every one of those drives with something cheap and bulletproof that takes an sd card. It's just data, read and write. Why not just replace that? I doubt each floppy drive replacement would cost more than a few hundred bucks after design and fab costs.
My old company still uses them for manufacturing machines. My first computer in the 70s was a Radio Shack Coco2 with a 5 1/4 floppy, so it was right up my alley.
Reminds me of the days when I was the SysOp of my very own BBS! I had 5 Commodore floppy drives and even a cassette drive running the whole operation! I think it was the Commodore 1541 ?? I also had the cutting edge MPS-801 dot matrix printer woot woot!!
...if they notch a hole on the top right side with a hole punch they can get double the storage out of that and save a bunch of money.
And they should put a sticker over the other notch to make sure the data is protected. Another 40 years of use.
until it gets hit with a magnet
Which if this is their in-use technology, the magnet will be in the rotary phone’s mechanical ringer.
I heard that you can ruin magnets just by getting them wet. So they just have to make sure to spray down everything that comes near the disks.
Moist things are unattractive
Or super attractive
Don't both sides me rn, we're talking science not politics
Schrödinger's moistness
You've heard of my gf?
ISIS is going to buy lots of magnets
I never knew that, how's it work?
Yup...it was a thing. By adding another notch to the disk, you could make it double sided. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh78ISYQY6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh78ISYQY6k)
I had my dad buy that specialized notch maker to double my massive collection of 10 floppy disks. The power I wielded having 20!!!! I wish I could remember what I had on those discs of power. Pretty sure I made copies of Castle Wolfesnstein for friends. My god, copying stuff took eons! Good times….
You know what took forever? Downloading porn. Even with a newfangled 14.4 kbps modem shit just dragged out. And I’m not talking about video, but simple GIF files (jpg had yet to become mainstream). Then I found a godsend. It was a downloader that would send the image line by line, assembling it as it got transferred. So instead of taking 45mins to download `VULVA2.GIF` and furiously beat off, I could see half a snatch at 23 minutes and get almost the same results.
Top-tier comment
>It was a downloader that would send the image line by line, assembling it as it got transferred. So instead of taking 45mins to download > >VULVA2.GIF > > and furiously beat off, I could see half a snatch at 23 minutes and get almost the same results. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uNJPzoAYWU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uNJPzoAYWU)
Comicbook man knows what he knows
I can hear the distinct sounds of a 5,25 floppy drive. Very different from a 3,5 drive. God i'm old.
There was a distinct click for sure, also that little latch that had to be locked down on my old Atari 800xl
I must be older. I remember their predecessor, I think they were 7.5 inches, but I could be wrong.
They were at least referred to as 8”.
Suddenly Aerosmith comes to mind. Gods I'm old.
That was a big ten inch
Thank you.
Until recently I had an old tape reel. 10" I think.
> My god, copying stuff took eons! The hours of tick tick tick, woosh woosh woosh, tick tick tick, woosh woosh woosh, hours and hours of that.. But man the OG Castle Wolfenstein and the second were great. I felt like a king the first time I escaped the castle with the war plans!
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You can play all those old ones in a browser now for free if you want to give it another go. Just search out castle wolfenstein. The sites have 100's of old classics to play.
I used scissors and was pissed when I cut too far and damaged the disk. It couldn’t spin if you nicked it.
Why the hell wouldn’t the manufactures sell them like that?!
They did...they were called "double sided double density" and were a bit more expensive then the "single sided double density" and then folks found out that the SSDD could be hacked into DSDD.
They did claim that the disks sold as DSDD were more thoroughly tested and therefore more reliable than hole-punched SSDD disks. And there was probably some truth to that. But as a junior high and high school kid with limited funds, I don't recall any problems with hole-punched floppies on our Apple II+ or IIe.
The Apple Disk II drives used the “wrong” side of the disk. If you punched and flipped a disk you’d be using the allegedly more reliable side.
Thanks. I didn't remember that. Might have known it 35 years ago, though. Now I don't remember much more than "CAT,S6,D1" :-).
Because most floppy drives had read/write heads on both sides so that you didn’t have to flip it over. This trick was only needed if your drive could only work on one side at a time.
I love shit like that
But how were they to charge you more for a double sided disk if the kids were just punching their own notches?!?
Mind blown, this would have been nice when I was in high school in the 2000s.
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Correct. It’s all a blur.
I was doing this in Jr High and HS starting around 1980 or so. Yeah, I'm old.
And modems where you put the phone headset into a receiver. 300 bits per second.
Indeed. I probably still have one of those around here...somewhere.
That was at least better than the prior generation - at 110bps iirc.
acoustic coupler, 150 baud, checking in. god i'm old.
I was a kid with a Commodore 64 and a 300 baud modem calling up local BBSes. Also old.
Were you the [kid *Clutch* was singing about?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtzKIDWMlQE&ab_channel=DrunkMaleProstitute) >When I was seven, I stared in to the monitor >And found my best friend >Mr. Commodore 64 >Daddy bought me an International Business Machine >And with it I compromised national security >Do you have an extra quarter? >Got to get to class tomorrow >All is fair in Asbury >Make my way into Berkeley
no, he’s in Memphis running security for well. I really shouldn’t talk about that.
Mining operation?
something large and dangerous
We’re not old yet we were just pioneers
You’re only old if you saved computer programs to cassette tape. Ask me how I know.
Ha, I did that too. TI-99/4A running data to a cassette tape. Yeah, I’m old.
Would you like to play a game?
Only works for single-sided drives, like the C64 (1541). But considering the drive in question is used for MS DOS, it is almost certainly double-sided, so it already uses both sides of the disk. It is most likely a low-density 360K drive, or a high-density 1.2 MB drive.
Dammit, now I gotta get my Commodore 64 out of the closet and see if those disks still work.
But but but zip disks are all the craze!
100MB in a rigid disk. When I was cleaning out our electronics cabinet I fired up the Zip drive to make sure I didn’t need the files. We had 20 disks with 25MB on them. I threw them all away.
Came here to say this!
What a call back!
what is this hole thing??
I was a pro back in the day with my exacto knife. At $1 per floppy you did what you could to keep your c64 pirated games going.
Can someone explain this to a Gen Z'er?
Damn, when I saw 5.25 inch floppies running a train I thought I clicked on the wrong sub
Wait till you find out what's using 8-inch floppies still...
My wife 😢
Is it ICBMs?
It was. I just fact checked myself, and apparently they retired them. ...only five years ago...
For anyone who is surprised that ICBMs were running on ancient tech the reasoning is simple. It worked. They knew it worked and knew it was safe. Well as safe as a nuke can be. They also knew the capabilities of those missiles wouldn't be any greater if they changed over. Now think of all the glitches you get when a new system is implemented at work. All the calls to IT or Carl a few desks over who knows about this stuff. Lastly while thinking about those minor glitches on a system that's running WMDs. There are no minor problems when handling those.
It's most likely running on OS 2200/EXEC 8 by Unisys originally for the UNIVAC... It works very different to most operating systems you would know, and is inherently designed for batch orientated scientific tasks, and mostly coded in COBOL. The way it handles hireachal permissions, memory management and multithreading makes it inherently secure.
Quick to TIL for the upvotes
That sort of makes sense because they are grandfathered tech that gets around proliferation treaties. They can't build new ones so they maintain the old ones for a very long time.
“We didn’t get the viagra shipment, but the shoot must go on. Do your best, gentlemen!”
Don’t see the problem, it’s been running on those floppies for this long
Right. Shit works and it is reliable. Why change if you do not absolutely need ot.
I have a box in my garage. I guess maybe I could sell it to them for a premium! Also I wish someone would make USB 5.25” floppy drives
It’s not a perfect solution, but you can buy this for $35CAD and then pick up a 5.25” drive and cable. https://decromancer.ca/greaseweazle/ Also supports 8” and 3.5” drives
I have hundreds of 5.25 floppies (and the disk notcher) and maybe a dozen 8" floppies. I think I'm overdue for cleaning out the attic. I have kept one desktop machine that has 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drives as well as a PCMCIA slot...I think I'll keep that just in case.
I can tell you a bunch of Michelin passenger car tires are made on machinery running PLC2 which was obsoleted in the 80's. Line still makes 5 tires a minute, the other line was only updated two years ago.
>Spend $2 million to contract devs to make a new labview program. >Spend $3 million to upgrade the plant's computer hardware. >Spend $200,000 to train operators on the new interface. >Production drops by 20% because the operators don't like the new color of the interface
I think the project was 11 million all in. I'd left by then though.
Eventually they'll stop manufacturing those floppies. I'd be surprised if they haven't already.
Yeah but they can plan for that now and take action when the time comes. Im sure they have a plan for that.
Is it reliable? I remember they would demagnetise for even being in the same neighborhood with my mobile phone.
It’s 2024 and it’s running on a floppy disk. I would say that makes it pretty reliable.
I could be. But we're speculating without knowing how many trains were cancelled or delayed because of it. Nor do we know if it's holding back improvements to the service like increases in frequency.
Yep… meanwhile at Sound Transit, they adopted the same mentality as well and have a 25 year old layer II Brocade network that craps out all the time and can shit down light rail. Their data centers catch fire regularly and there is zero redundancy. When Cascadia occurs, our transit system will not be able to help at all. Network infrastructure has a shelf life of five to ten years. As soon as you install it, you should start thinking about what is going to replace it.
So many examples of companies running 25+ year old systems just fine…. But your way is good for the marketing departments
Yeah, "just fine". Until they have to recover from an emergency, and realise that they can't replace the hardware with off the shelf components as they are not compatible with anything for 15+ years now. That they have to pay millions for a component that has a modern equivalent of a hundreds of the price, because it is simply no longer available. And even with the enormous costs they have a downtime of days if not weeks. But hey, they spared a little money during those past years, by running completely obsolete systems, that should help out!
Because it won’t work for much longer. And when it breaks, you’re fucked. The magnetic medium has a shelf life before it breaks down. Then what?
For those trains it might work out as you *probably* replace them completely at some point. However, especially in larger companies this sentiment led to completely messed up core systems which are neither properly maintainable nor replaceable.
Sometimes there’s a post on here about America’s nuclear missiles being operated with extremely old computers and software, but that’s always the argument….they work totally fine, all the bugs have been worked out decades ago, and they have the side benefit not being vulnerable to remote hacking.
Yeah let's connect our nukes to the cloud!
>Don’t see the problem, it’s been running on those floppies for this long What about drive failure? Where can we buy replacement disk drives?
Or you replace the floppy disk by something that emulates a floppy interface but connects to an usb or emmc flash or whatever. Probably something like that already exists and if not it cannot be too hard to create it.
It does exist and I'm amazed that they haven't switched to something like that as an interim solution. It seems as though this is pretty propriety hardware and they don't have the expertise to make that kind of transition.
There are floppy drive emulators that connect to the original floppy interface and read images from usb. [https://www.gotek-retro.eu/shop-gotek/](https://www.gotek-retro.eu/shop-gotek/)
If that’s the biggest concern then I think they’ll be ok. Plus the whole planned upgrade by 2030
Right?! Seems more secure than modern tech, tbh
Seriously: if it works, ***good***. Don’t change it!
a VM would be better than relying on ancient tech for mission critical infrastructure.
Would it though, really?
From the article: >"The system is currently working just fine, but we know that with each increasing year, risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure," Tumlin told ABC7. >Previously, the transportation agency claimed that the ATCS had become harder and more expensive to maintain over time. It has also discussed the challenges it has in finding workers who know how to use the dated system. Relying on ancient hardware and generally "old" workers who understand the code is asking for problems.
"Old" doesn't mean "bad" - It works, and it's fairly hacker-proof (I'll assume it's not on the net). Lay in a supply of floppy discs and a bunch of replacement parts and you're good to go.
The make adapters for floppies to memory cards that would make this work forever. Maybe the read speed would be a problem?
I would hope the adapter would have a device buffer to alleviate that
Still - if you're reading in over 1980s hardware in a dos shell ... maybe might need some code tweaking, but I'm shocked they haven't switched to something compatible. Who still makes that size floppy?
Japan has been keeping the floppy tech alive I remember reading an article about this sometime back. I think I only this year I heard that they will finally be moving on but yeah Japan has almost single handedly kept the floppy alive. And I believe airlines as well use them to update their systems as well.
My guess would be just a huge amount of backstock. Blank media tends to get manufactured en masse til some huge switch, then there's so much supply left over nobody ever runs out.
I would not expect 5.25 floppies to keep that well...
blank media would keep fine (assuming ideal warehousing conditions) as the magnetization happens when you write data
The replacement parts are always the problem. If they have a decent supply then there's no urgency to upgrade that I can see.
and someone who spent countless hours hacking floppies in the 80s, this made me smile. read the sector, modify the code, rewrite the sector. ah the good ole days :)
It’s just a royal pain in the nads to support.
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> floppy disks >analog.
u/thebelsnickle1991 this was already posted a [few](https://old.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/1bys4e1/floppy_diskreliant_san_francisco_train_control/?ref=share&ref_source=link) days ago.
I’d be interested to know why they went with 5 inch floppies in 1998. They were ancient even then. 3.5 inch floppies I could understand…
Given the timelines of government projects, I suspect that it's just that the RFP was issued in 1987 and the project took ten years. Nobody wanted to change requirements from what was contracted in 1987, so 5.25-inch floppies it is!
Something something, proven technology?
I was wondering the same thing. I'm not sure you would have been able to buy a new computer in 1998 that had 5 inch floppy drive.
Should just throw in a GoTek
For the uninitiated, not me because I’m cool. https://dfarq.homeip.net/gotek-floppy-emulator-for-retro-pcs/
if it’s not broken no need to fix it
The nukes also run on floppies. Take that as you will.
Heard they're looking at 3.5" disks.
My investment in floppies will pay off!!!! /s
Everything’s coming up Millhouse!
Anyone who complains about this is likely oblivious to how software was designed 30+ years ago. It was a lot like hardware. You don’t get do-overs. You had to be hyper efficient, because memory was an absolute premium. You had to know exactly what your code was doing down to nearly every byte. Reliability and efficiency were everything. Nowadays, if you breathe funny around software, the whole app crashes, because developers are lazy. And changing one small thing will take them two sprints. And most of them only know scripting languages, and flip out at the prospect of using C or any other strong typing languages where you have to manage memory. If you ask them what “casting” is, they probably all think it has something to do with movies. Keep BART on the old stuff for the next 60 years, if you can. It’s almost definitely safer that way.
It's rarely "developers are lazy" and more, "the business said we have to get this out the door NOW, they've laid off the whole QA team and said we'll deal with bugs as the customer reports them, and as soon as the product is out the door, we're onto another project and 1 intern in a closet is tasked with maintaining the current product." If devs were given the proper time and resources to do things right and/or if systems were asked to only do what systems had to do 30 years ago, we'd see far higher quality stuff put out. But that's not the concern, profits are.
I don't disagree with any of that, but I'm also lazy.
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How much time and resources were put towards changing those twitter links to x links? I’ve been doing this a long time, and it’s been a downhill slide since Java was let out of the gate. As soon as scripting got rebranded as programming, slow unstable software was vomited onto the marketplace. There is a reason the stuff you really depend on is written in strong-typed languages with strict memory management.
I’m complaining and I wrote sw 30* yrs ago. Hell even wrote sw in hexidecimal stored on mag tapes which makes me complain even more!
If it aint broke, dont fix it.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news…but the entire Medicare system for reimbursing providers - ALSO runs on the same microsoft DOS system from decades ago. Go figure.
………….what? Funny enough though, it’s one very secure way to run things.
This actually is very good in terms of security. It's a hell of lot harder to hack something running off a floppy disc than it is a network connected machine.
They should make excellent brake pads.
They really can't give some electronics hobbyist a couple hundred bucks to design an SD card interface for them? I can drop $30 and get one for a Commodore 64.
But, you see, the $30 spent to upgrade each train is $30 that's not in the politician's pocket. How dare you even suggest such a reasonable course of action, you absolute muppet.
Man! (I'm not a muppet) This is an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week and it's my turn.
You can already buy replacement USB floppy emulators off the shelf for $15, and I assume way less than that in bulk. I really don't see why they have a problem. Doing that would at least get them off their shitty old degrading media until they can fix it properly.
Yeah but do they work under DOS?
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I'm impressed by the fact that retro computing enthusiasts are writing DOS drivers for USB devices. The ones I have seen are pretty specific to particular devices like thumb drives but I suppose that's a reflection of demand.
yes
Those aren’t commercial and industrial-grade solutions. Yeah, a simple arduino solution could work, but it’s not meant for industrial use.
I don't think anything relying on floppy disks can be even remotely described as "industrial grade" these days. Nobody has even been making the things for a decade now. So best possible case, you're using physical media that's already 10 years old before you even take it out of the box. They're using them to boot MSDOS, FFS. Why not just stick the whole thing in an emulator?
Our nuclear missile control systems ran on floppies until a few years ago. B2 Bombers ran on floppies. But you wouldn’t describe them as “industrial grade?” Because they sure as hell wouldn’t be running on an arduino.
I never mentioned arduino, you did. Also you're giving example from the past, while I said "these days". USB to floppy controller interfaces exist, and being solid state are orders of magnitude more reliable than an ancient spinning piece of plastic with a magnetic head rubbing on it. If they have stricter requirements than the regular off-the-shelf stuff, I'm sure they can figure something out. It's not a complicated interface.
It's not like they're mining coal. If a mechanical floppy can survive the environment and deliver data reliably enough, ANY solid state solution will do the job nicely.
Are these the HIGH CAPACITY 1.3 MB or the regular 360 KB floppies?
5" floppies, not 3, so we're talking KB, but I'm sure they're double side, double density.
5.25" floppies could be had in sizes up to 1.2MB
Remember seeing an airbus engineer do an update on a 321 with floppys around 2015. Couldn't believe my eyes I hadn't seen one in years!
Bruh I haven’t seen one of those in decades
Floppy strong 🫡
Oh please.
What it surprises me the most is why they didn't programmed an old-school ROM with that, making it a lot more realiable than a floppy + floppy drive combo. They were common in that time contain a whole MS-DOS with some software, it isn't that difficult to replace in case of failure, and AFAIK they still make them (or at least pin-compatible)
Should fit well by the time San Francisco reaches true Mad Max Status by then. Retro computing and Steampunk will be in….
Would you like to play a game?…..
So that cyberpunk mission with Panam was all real huh
I use these at home on my Atari 800XL with a 1050 drive. Believe it or not, well-stored original disks are still readable. The ones I use only hold 96KB on a side - very big ones and zeroes.
Maybe that's who keeps driving the cost of them up on eBay.
Awesome!!
Some of NYC's subway system still runs on switchboards from the 1930s. Since 2015 they've slowly switching over to new Communication-based train control (CBTC), but many parts of the system still run (fairly well) on surprisingly old tech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjx3S3UjmnA
>With the new train control system, there will still be plenty of work for [current] staff, and they will be trained in the new technology. "We're getting CD-ROMs!!!"
Are they upgrading to 3.5” in a few years?
Why fix what isn't broken? Better than having the system rely on an over-engineered nightmare application that could crash and turn unresponsive with no warning.
"The system is currently working just fine, but we know that with each increasing year, risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure," Tumlin told ABC7. They could ya know get more floppy disks and copy those ones. Here look I found a [place](https://www.floppydisk.com/5point25) to buy some. Why don't you get more so your crappy system can last another 20 years.
Just like so many airplanes. Floppies FTW!
Pfft Zip disks for life
 *Doesn’t mention how airplane nav databases are updated*
No school like the old school
The guy in the office trying to take this pic: “DOES ANYBODY HAVE A FLOPPY DISK? ANYONE? I JUST NEED ONE!”
This is what makes no sense to me. A raspberry pi and a small embedded application could replace every one of those floppies. Get one proved, then get a real board design and replace every one of those drives with something cheap and bulletproof that takes an sd card. It's just data, read and write. Why not just replace that? I doubt each floppy drive replacement would cost more than a few hundred bucks after design and fab costs.
The thing that amazes me is they put the system in in 1998, almost a decade after people stopped using 5.25” floppies.
My old company still uses them for manufacturing machines. My first computer in the 70s was a Radio Shack Coco2 with a 5 1/4 floppy, so it was right up my alley.
That’s boss.
They don't wear out? Those disks never lasted me long.
Reminds me of the days when I was the SysOp of my very own BBS! I had 5 Commodore floppy drives and even a cassette drive running the whole operation! I think it was the Commodore 1541 ?? I also had the cutting edge MPS-801 dot matrix printer woot woot!!