San Francisco to pay $212 million to end reliance on 5.25-inch floppy disks
San Francisco to pay $212 million to end reliance on 5.25-inch floppy disks
See also: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/5-25-inch-floppy-disks-expected-to-help-run-san-francisco-trains-until-2030/ \ https://lemmy.ca/post/19158929
So they're upgrading to 3.5" and token ring?
What’s a token ring?
Also I’m pretty sure I still have a box of 3.5” they can have lol
What’s a token ring?
Wait-your-turn Internet
The idea was one computer on the LAN would hold the “talking stick” (the token) and transmit whatever data it needed to, then pass the token off to the next computer in the ring. If a computer received the token and didn’t have anything to transmit, it’d just pass on the token. The problem would be detecting when one of the computers in the loop had gone offline or crashed and taken the token with it. After some amount of time with no traffic, some system was responsible for generating a new token and an amended turn order. Similar problems existed when a new computer wanted to get added to the rotation.
5.25" floppies were obsolete for years before they even installed the system in 1998. They could have been using compact flash cards by then.
Compact flash? Nah, that was primetime for Iomega Zip Drives!
Fear the click of death!
Fuck yo Zip Drives, all my homies use SyQuest
It would have been replaced a long time ago if that was the case.
SuperDisk gang ride up!
It’s not quite as crazy as it seems. The older/larger floppy disk formats were more reliable due to their lower track density.
There was more surface area per byte of data. The old floppy disks could be written once and read for years in harsher environments. New floppy disks we more prone to failure after a few years.
Sounds like a grift. All you need is an emulator and a disk image.
Yeah if that's all that needed replacing. The entire system is ancient, not just the disks, like:
Much more critical than the dated use of floppy disks is the system's loop cable, which transmits data between the central servers and the trains and, according to Roccaforte, "has less bandwidth than an old AOL dial-up modem."
The SFMTA's website adds:
The loop cable is fragile and easily disturbed. This makes subway maintenance more difficult. This also means the system cannot be extended outside the subway, along surface rail, where currently we don’t have automatic train control.
The loop cable and other non-floppy improvements are priced out separately according to the article.
Gee, I wonder how much this would’ve cost in the past before they kept putting it off
"If you think this is expensive now, wait for 20 years" "Not a problem, I'll be retired by then, it'll be someone else's problem"
Hands up who’s “someone else” where they work right now✋
All the deserved ribbing aside, if you had to design a removable, R/W, high-capacity, environmentally tolerant, secure, fault-tolerant, mission critical storage system that could last 25 years, starting NOW...
What would you pick?
That's a tough one, even if you design future hardware upgrades into the system.
Sounds like an addiction
Hey man, you got any of them floppies?
Far more than I am proud to say, far more.
wait till they hear from the 5.25" Floppy Disk lobby
This is clearly a tender fail. Byte code can be emulated for a fraction on that price. And it's a two or three man job with a rota
They’d be better off not relying on the cloud.
I've got an old USB 3.5 drive for posterity, SF. I'll light one up for you.
They're not merely replacing floppies, swapping in some emulators to take over. They're attempting to redesign and future-proof the entire system. That kind of a big deal. Oh, and it all has to run flawlessly during the transition period.
This ain't your homelab boys.
According to the article, the other improvements are priced separately from the $212 million de-floppy-ing.
And that cost includes decades of support.
No, the $212 million includes the entire upgrade (and 20 years of support) of the automatic train control system. The full $700 million plus is for the overall modernization of multiple systems.