News The FAA seeks to eliminate floppy disk usage in air traffic control systems

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Old hardware is the least of the concerns regarding flight control. Hiring more air traffic controllers, working on better retention and fixing up facilities would go a lot further than this will. If only they'd start doing that immediately while designing a plan for replacing the hardware (which absolutely needs to be done, but cannot be done quickly).
 
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Since Windows 95 is much simpler than Windows 11, it is much easier to verify when it is working as intended.

From my point of view air traffic control is a specialised enough application domain that compatibility with general-purpose Windows software is irrelevant. At the same time reliability and security are important enough that an auditable and independently maintainable software stack becomes a necessary.

For these reasons building a new system on OpenBSD sounds somehow reasonable. At the same time, there are hard real-time requirements that likely preclude the use of any Unix-like operating system as well as any modern version of Windows.
 
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ejolson said:
Since Windows 95 is much simpler than Windows 11, it is much easier to verify when it is working as intended.

From my point of view air traffic control is a specialised enough application domain that compatibility with general-purpose Windows software is irrelevant. At the same time reliability and security are important enough that an auditable and independently maintainable software stack becomes a necessary.

For these reasons building a new system on OpenBSD sounds somehow reasonable. At the same time, there are hard real-time requirements that likely preclude the use of any Unix-like operating system as well as any modern version of Windows.
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And currently, large swathes of the US DoD are currently running or in the process of upgrading to Win 11.
The Win 11 the run is not the same Win11 as what is on your desktop.
 
USAFRet said:
Properly configured, stable enough for large parts of the DoD.
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Disagree. Even the best set up 9x kernel is inherently unstable compared to NT or the Unix/Unix-like OSs.

Witness that you couldn't even keep 9x up more than a few days without running out of resources, no matter how much ram you had. Never mind the lack of FULL 32-bit pre-emptive kernel which makes 9x vulnerable to crashes.
 
blppt said:
Disagree. Even the best set up 9x kernel is inherently unstable compared to NT or the Unix/Unix-like OSs.

Witness that you couldn't even keep 9x up more than a few days without running out of resources, no matter how much ram you had. Never mind the lack of FULL 32-bit pre-emptive kernel which makes 9x vulnerable to crashes.
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You can 'disagree' all you want.

I'm just speaking from experience.
 
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To be fair, I would want air traffic control systems to be designed how industrial computers are setup, no fancy touch screens or bells and whistles. Just use the most dependable hardware and software you can for minimal downtime. That being said air traffic control systems do have a history of going down...
 
MobileJAD said:
That being said air traffic control systems do have a history of going down...
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Meanwhile, thousands of flights are in the air, right now.
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blppt said:
Disagree. Even the best set up 9x kernel is inherently unstable compared to NT or the Unix/Unix-like OSs.

Witness that you couldn't even keep 9x up more than a few days without running out of resources, no matter how much ram you had. Never mind the lack of FULL 32-bit pre-emptive kernel which makes 9x vulnerable to crashes.
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You're thinking about desktop windows, not embedded windows. Things like safes and cash registers and other industry/retail applications that need very high availability run just fine on Windows embedded for months at a time.
 
"You're thinking about desktop windows, not embedded windows."
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Its the same kernel with the same inherent problems. Now, its not going to be as bad as a normal desktop running Windows 9x, with all sorts of 3rd party programs running and desktop requirements, but the GUI and kernel have the same stability problems, and I'm not sure there ever was a headless mode for a 9x based Windows, embedded or not.

Embedded windows that you see in critical applications like safes and ATMs tend to be NT based, not 9x, though I have seen some based on the latter.
 
USAFRet said:
You can 'disagree' all you want.

I'm just speaking from experience.
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Its not a question of experience. The 9x kernel is indisputably subject to instability compared to NT or a Unix/Unixlike kernel, your "experience" does not matter, its a matter of fact. Read up on how each kernel works and what the flaws of the 9x kernel are.

I'm not even sure why you are arguing this.
 
blppt said:
Disagree. Even the best set up 9x kernel is inherently unstable compared to NT or the Unix/Unix-like OSs.

Witness that you couldn't even keep 9x up more than a few days without running out of resources, no matter how much ram you had. Never mind the lack of FULL 32-bit pre-emptive kernel which makes 9x vulnerable to crashes.
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Consider a scenario where you may not want to preempt your applications; one where the realtime operation of the application is more important than the OS having control over it. Now imagine that every single byte of code is perfectly tuned to the hardware it's on. In such a scenario, application crash recovery is worse than useless and a preemptive OS is less stable for the intended function of the system.
 
USAFRet said:
And currently, large swathes of the US DoD are currently running or in the process of upgrading to Win 11.
The Win 11 the run is not the same Win11 as what is on your desktop.
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I'm pretty sure that the backend is Server 2019+ and the Win11 computers are just a terminal to access the software on the servers. Basically using either thin or zero clients.
 
The security company I worked for held the contract for service of video and alarm systems for the location here in Peachtree City (really Hampton). It was a bit of a surprise to walk in there and see all those CRT "green screens" still in use.
 
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jeremyj_83 said:
Fair. I just have no idea why they would run that on a desktop OS. That would be 100% against best practices at any level of IT.
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If you're talking about what the FAA is running, that's one thing.
That may well be thin clients (but I don't think so).

If you're talking about the vast majority of DoD desktops are using...that IS Win 10/11.
 
USAFRet said:
If you're talking about what the FAA is running, that's one thing.
That may well be thin clients (but I don't think so).

If you're talking about the vast majority of DoD desktops are using...that IS Win 10/11.
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Running Win11 for the desktop is fine. I wouldn't be surprised if the DoD uses VDI as that makes the most sense in a large scale environment. It sounded like you were saying that the some places were using Win11 to run the production software which would be completely crazy as it isn't designed for that.
 
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