News Floppy disk-reliant San Francisco train control system spurs concerns of 'catastrophic failure' — and it won't be replaced for at least another decade

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I know the author pointed out that by 1998 the Norm for most systems was CD, but you must remember all things public and government related typically run a decade behind technologically. Sometimes even further. There is a good chance that whoever the contractor was who designed and installed that system either could only do that type of system, or was under contract to provide that type of system. In 1998, a floppy based system was still pretty relevant, and was tested and known to be resilient. Same thing if you look at technology used by NASA in a lot of their missions. It's usually a few generations older, and has been hardened against issues they know they'll face. What is sad is that the hardware they apparently installed in 1998 has no way of using other hardware for data storage and updates. That is poor foresight.
 
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Admin said:
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s train control system has been reliant on a floppy disk-based computer system since 1998. It won't be replaced for at least another decade.

Floppy disk-reliant San Francisco train control system spurs concerns of 'catastrophic failure' — and it won't be replaced for at least another decade : Read more
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Haha, old tech eh? You never know where it is going to crop up.

When I moved to London in 1960's, I was amazed to learn that train control on London underground was implemented using 'Pianola Rolls'! I cannot find coverage of this online, but there is a readable account in print: article in 'Meccano Magazine' circa 1959.

I have to admit, I still keep a pair of floppy drives (5.25 &3.5), on the end of a very long power and data cable. When the need to flash a BIOS on an old machine arises, they often were meant to be updated from floppy, so it is the easiest way to do this. OK, I know there are other ways, but anything for making life easier.

The 5.25 drive, I rediscovered where it had laid amongst some of my junk for about 40 years, The huge flywheel was covered in rust. I thought it would never again work. But I also found some 5.25 disks, and was curious to know what as on them: turned out it was an application called 'Harvard Graphics'. That device, unused for decades, thrown into junk........

Powered up and ran fault free!
 
You can probably fix this without touching the main system or its code. Use a floppy emulator that takes a USB flash drive, something like what retro gamers use. I'm sure something more robust and well tested could be made within a modest budget. Obviously security issues will have to be investigated too. But, it isn't as hard as they make it sound.
 
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DavidMV said:
You can probably fix this without touching the main system or its code. Use a floppy emulator that takes a USB flash drive, something like what retro gamers use. I'm sure something more robust and well tested could be made within a modest budget. Obviously security issues will have to be investigated too. But, it isn't as hard as they make it sound.
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Yes. Floppies not the best for retaining data integrity are they.

About fifteen years ago, when floppies were on their way out, I purchased a load of MIDI music files at a clearance (ie for peanuts) on floppies from my local music shop. About a fifth of these have degraded to now be not usable. Fortunately I had copied their content, so media deterioration did not matter.
 
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newtechldtech said:
it will be some Gen 10 in 2050 .. the data per lane will not it the wall in 2050 ... it will take longer.
by the way , back in 1998 we had usb already and today still working.
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Yes, we had USB.
1.0.

And disturbingly slow connecting a 1.0 device to a current system.

But, whatever.
Protocols and interfaces change.
Sometimes, they go away completely. Or are so slow as to be laughable.
 
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It's a train, and it runs on fixed destination railway tracks.
The drive only needed to keep ATC data, so storage size requirements aren't massively important.
It didn't need bleeding edge technology. It needed something that was cheap and reliable (at the time), and Floppies would have been perfect.

Back in the Win95/98 era, CDs and flash drives were not largely reliable.
For that matter, device drivers of that era were not good for flash drives.
You do not want to use a motion sensitive HDD on something that moves.
Tape would have been more expensive and larger.

If I were to select a replacement, why not EEPROM?
16MB should be more than enough.
 
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hotaru251 said:
most likely.

thats only 26yrs away and looking at modern tech USB would likely still work then.


Picking floppy in '98 when CD was superior before that and only growing stronger was just a fools choice.

heck DOOM was on CD in '93.
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I get it.

I have files from late 80's/early 90's on my QNAP NAS right now.

I have a couple laptops from that era, on the shelf in my garage.

But making all of those old parts work with current systems is a non-trivial exercise.
 
DavidMV said:
You can probably fix this without touching the main system or its code. Use a floppy emulator that takes a USB flash drive, something like what retro gamers use. I'm sure something more robust and well tested could be made within a modest budget. Obviously security issues will have to be investigated too. But, it isn't as hard as they make it sound.
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Very hard thing to do ... for free.

Probably very hard to get paid to do it when the polititians would rather go out to bid on a whole new train system. There's a lot more lobbying in that.

"any new system will take about a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to implement. There is no contractor yet, so the decade-long development cycle has yet to begin"
 
but “with each increasing year risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure,” he worried.
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Seriously can't they get a working floppy drive on a system that supports it, pay a manufacturer to build some brand new 5.25" or 3.5" floppies (if the current stocks of unused disks aren't adequate), image their current disks, and then just rewrite multiple copies of the old disks to new disks and parity check them to ensure that they are correct? Plus or minus the bespoke floppy manufacturing this shouldn't cost more than $5k - $10k in parts and labor.

https://www.howtogeek.com/669331/how-to-read-a-floppy-disk-on-a-modern-pc-or-mac/
Building a USB 5.25" FDD with both read and write: https://youtu.be/Bjd2jSHBw7E
Pre-built (though only reads): http://www.deviceside.com/

But I imagine a functioning computer from the mid 1990s with an old version of Linux or DOS on it would work just fine.
 
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Interesting read but why is the image a picture of Caltrain? SFMTA and Caltrain are different systems, and Caltrain is much more up to date. I think they just upgraded their whole train control system for the new electric trains (pictured).

Would suggest the author/editor/whoever take the five seconds to google image search "sfmta train" and choose one of those pictures.

At best it's poor practice and at worst could open up legal (idk I'm not a lawyer) issues.
 
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USAFRet said:
If you were to build a system today, would it be capable of being seamlessly upgraded to whatever hardware is in use in 2050?
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I am confident it would be no problem if the system (written today) was adequately documented. With adequate documentation a new system such as this could be developed relatively easily.

The 10-year estimate is likely inaccurate. It probably is not from someone experienced with analyzing and estimating projects. I am not. If the project requires much time then the majority of time would be to reverse-engineer the system.
 
jahcriado said:
I know the author pointed out that by 1998 the Norm for most systems was CD, but you must remember all things public and government related typically run a decade behind technologically. Sometimes even further. There is a good chance that whoever the contractor was who designed and installed that system either could only do that type of system, or was under contract to provide that type of system. In 1998, a floppy based system was still pretty relevant, and was tested and known to be resilient. Same thing if you look at technology used by NASA in a lot of their missions. It's usually a few generations older, and has been hardened against issues they know they'll face. What is sad is that the hardware they apparently installed in 1998 has no way of using other hardware for data storage and updates. That is poor foresight.
Click to expand...
Also, to point out that government employees don't ever risk anything. The government employees most likely insisted that floppy disks were used as that is what they were still using to store their personal data on.
 
dmitche31958 said:
Also, to point out that government employees don't ever risk anything. The government employees most likely insisted that floppy disks were used as that is what they were still using to store their personal data on.
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I don't know if I would buy that.

I recall how I interpreted it as an opportunity when I could use tech at work, paid for by my employer, that was beyond that which I could afford for my personal use at home.
 
jahcriado said:
I know the author pointed out that by 1998 the Norm for most systems was CD, but you must remember all things public and government related typically run a decade behind technologically. Sometimes even further. There is a good chance that whoever the contractor was who designed and installed that system either could only do that type of system, or was under contract to provide that type of system. In 1998, a floppy based system was still pretty relevant, and was tested and known to be resilient. Same thing if you look at technology used by NASA in a lot of their missions. It's usually a few generations older, and has been hardened against issues they know they'll face. What is sad is that the hardware they apparently installed in 1998 has no way of using other hardware for data storage and updates. That is poor foresight.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I was sharing adult images on floppy with friends in 1998. Cd's were around, but still kinda expensive for the drives.
 
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