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Can anyone speak to why those systems were considered more reliable? Are world agencies relying on this technology because of the inherent risk of rebuilding sy

Can anyone speak to why those systems were considered more reliable? Are world agencies relying on this technology because of the inherent risk of rebuilding systems, or because of some attractive property of floppy disks?

arcanemachiner 2y ago
Just speculating here, but floppy disks can be wiped out by a magnet. Not exactly the most robust storage solution. So I would guess this is more about the friction of moving away from a legacy system, as opposed to the technological benefits of floppies.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  flash wipes itself out just sitting without power for as little as a year, and of course is made out of fantastically complex microscopic electronics. A floppy is ridiculously more robust than that, in the same way paper is even more robust than floppy. It actually takes a very very strong magnet in almost direct contact to alter a floppy.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    I can tell you’ve either never used floppies, or used them so little that your opinion was formed more by luck than experience. Floppies are ridiculously unreliable. They were bad, even when they were brand new in a new drive. Failure rates of one in thirty or so wasn’t unusual. Installing large software packages was a gamble because disc 27 of 33 might have a bad sector and ruin your day. Floppies written with one drive often wouldn’t work in another. The drives themselves would often collect dust depending on how the fans inside the PC case were set up. The drive head would often wear out the floppies, especially if they were used daily (e.g.: boot discs). Keeping them in a hot car in summer could destroy them. I learned about forward error correction (FEC) in desperation when I was in my early teens because it was the only robust way to retain data on floppies for any length of time. There were a whole bunch of compression formats that could split your data so that any n-of-m floppies could be used to recover your data in case a few failed.
    - ripply 2y ago
      Adding to this in Windows 2000 days WinRar had error correcting bits you could enable and make the compressed rar file bigger. I ended up only using that when I would save something to a floppy it was so unreliable.
    - Brian_K_White 2y ago
      I know all of that, having used floppies since the 70's. And those are all other aspects that don't address or invalidate any of what I said.
martin293 2y ago
Pretty sure it's the first one. New systems are inherently more complex which means more possibilities to screw things up.
jvanderbot 2y ago
The alternative is likely a bottom to top rearchitecture of the whole vessel, all the training, etc. Because you cant justify a modernization program centered around replacing floppy disks with ... What, USB? CD? You'd end up with a total modernization program if you're not careful.
7thaccount 2y ago
Not a software dev, but I would say that some code written in something like Ada and working off a floppy has about a bazillion less leaky abstractions than the new systems which run an entire Linux system (the brand new US littoral combat ships did this) with who knows all what. The former runs for decades without any issue. The latter basically makes maintenance a never ending cost and chore. It is similar to when my father's company switched from a mainframe that ran all their stuff and was written in the mid 80s to brand new off the shelf software. The replacement software is all about trying to make your needs fit into how the vendor's product works. His company unanimously believes the original software was significantly superior in terms of issues (it basically just ran for decades with almost no issues). The issue is the older tech keeps getting more niche, so you eventually kind of have to migrate sometimes.
- fy20 2y ago
  I guess the reason why this is the case is that code at that time was much lower level, and often had exclusive control of the CPU. I've toyed around with microcontrollers before with Assembly and C, and I found it fairly easy to hold the entire mental model of what the system (registers & memory) is doing at each instruction. I feel this can lead to less bugs, as you can fully understand what each step is doing. Compare that to something like JavaScript running in Electron, where at basically every line there is a chance that something could return an error or take away control of the CPU messing up your time dependant code. Of course there are ways to handle that, but it's a lot more complicated compared to a CPU your code runs on exclusively. Or you just run into bugs with third party code that you need to work around, or update a library and find a patch version introduced a breaking change. This is probably why PLCs are so popular in industry. You can make sure a tiny part of the system works correctly and is bug free. Then as long as the contract of how it communicates & interacts with other parts of the system is defined properly, the system as a whole will operate correctly.
exitb 2y ago
The floppy is just a visible artifact of a system that works, but is no longer easy to modify. Old systems often didn’t abstract away the implementation details of a floppy drive, so it might expect not a block storage, but rather something that actually behaves like a drive. It’s worth noting that current state-of-the-art emulation of Commodore 64 drive is still not perfect and fully compatible with all software.
mike_hearn 2y ago
They aren't reliable. Anyone who remembers floppy disks will remember how easily damaged they were, and that was back when the equipment was new. So for "reliable" read "avoids career risk". Outside of the tech industry IT projects fail a lot, and they fail in ways that non-technical people do not/cannot/will not try to understand. From the perspective of your average middle ranking executive or civil servant any project involving computers is very likely to just randomly end up delivering nothing despite consuming tens of millions of dollars/euros. The phenomenon is utterly baffling to them and feels hopeless. Combine it with a rolling heads culture in which the organizational response to failure is firing / sidelining someone in order to show accountability (vs a rigorous post-mortem analysis), and you get a lot of organizational weirdness that boils down to everyone scrambling away from anything that involves technology modernization. At some level the reason we have such a thing as a "tech company" or "startup" is because these are what we call organizations that aren't intimidated by software projects. Government organizations are especially prone to ending up on obsolete 1980s/90s era tech because there's no market pressure or bonuses incentivizing them to improve things, because awareness of how often IT projects fail is much higher now than it was back then, and because civil servants are typically very focused on staying inside the civil service and making it to pensionable age. The bulk of their comp is weighted towards the end of their lives due to way more generous pensions than in the private sector so this gives them all an incentive to avoid any project that might have a concrete failure mode.
- layer8 2y ago
  > outside of the tech industry IT projects fail a lot Within the tech industry as well. Replacing a running system tends to be high-risk for various reasons.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Maybe I've been lucky but the failure rate I saw inside tech firms is much lower than the rates I've seen outside it. Yes it still happens, but it's rarer and people don't freak out about it. You don't see executive careers go down in flames because some grunt accidentally used an O(N^2) algorithm at the core of a system and the project hit some arbitrary deadline before they got it fixed. And a lot of the riskier attempts at replacing things get outsourced to startups where the risk:reward ratio is a lot healthier.

arcanemachiner 2y ago

Just speculating here, but floppy disks can be wiped out by a magnet. Not exactly the most robust storage solution. So I would guess this is more about the friction of moving away from a legacy system, as opposed to the technological benefits of floppies.

Brian_K_White 2y ago
flash wipes itself out just sitting without power for as little as a year, and of course is made out of fantastically complex microscopic electronics. A floppy is ridiculously more robust than that, in the same way paper is even more robust than floppy. It actually takes a very very strong magnet in almost direct contact to alter a floppy.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  I can tell you’ve either never used floppies, or used them so little that your opinion was formed more by luck than experience. Floppies are ridiculously unreliable. They were bad, even when they were brand new in a new drive. Failure rates of one in thirty or so wasn’t unusual. Installing large software packages was a gamble because disc 27 of 33 might have a bad sector and ruin your day. Floppies written with one drive often wouldn’t work in another. The drives themselves would often collect dust depending on how the fans inside the PC case were set up. The drive head would often wear out the floppies, especially if they were used daily (e.g.: boot discs). Keeping them in a hot car in summer could destroy them. I learned about forward error correction (FEC) in desperation when I was in my early teens because it was the only robust way to retain data on floppies for any length of time. There were a whole bunch of compression formats that could split your data so that any n-of-m floppies could be used to recover your data in case a few failed.
  - ripply 2y ago
    Adding to this in Windows 2000 days WinRar had error correcting bits you could enable and make the compressed rar file bigger. I ended up only using that when I would save something to a floppy it was so unreliable.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    I know all of that, having used floppies since the 70's. And those are all other aspects that don't address or invalidate any of what I said.

martin293 2y ago

Pretty sure it's the first one. New systems are inherently more complex which means more possibilities to screw things up.

jvanderbot 2y ago

The alternative is likely a bottom to top rearchitecture of the whole vessel, all the training, etc. Because you cant justify a modernization program centered around replacing floppy disks with ... What, USB? CD? You'd end up with a total modernization program if you're not careful.

7thaccount 2y ago

Not a software dev, but I would say that some code written in something like Ada and working off a floppy has about a bazillion less leaky abstractions than the new systems which run an entire Linux system (the brand new US littoral combat ships did this) with who knows all what. The former runs for decades without any issue. The latter basically makes maintenance a never ending cost and chore. It is similar to when my father's company switched from a mainframe that ran all their stuff and was written in the mid 80s to brand new off the shelf software. The replacement software is all about trying to make your needs fit into how the vendor's product works. His company unanimously believes the original software was significantly superior in terms of issues (it basically just ran for decades with almost no issues). The issue is the older tech keeps getting more niche, so you eventually kind of have to migrate sometimes.

fy20 2y ago
I guess the reason why this is the case is that code at that time was much lower level, and often had exclusive control of the CPU. I've toyed around with microcontrollers before with Assembly and C, and I found it fairly easy to hold the entire mental model of what the system (registers & memory) is doing at each instruction. I feel this can lead to less bugs, as you can fully understand what each step is doing. Compare that to something like JavaScript running in Electron, where at basically every line there is a chance that something could return an error or take away control of the CPU messing up your time dependant code. Of course there are ways to handle that, but it's a lot more complicated compared to a CPU your code runs on exclusively. Or you just run into bugs with third party code that you need to work around, or update a library and find a patch version introduced a breaking change. This is probably why PLCs are so popular in industry. You can make sure a tiny part of the system works correctly and is bug free. Then as long as the contract of how it communicates & interacts with other parts of the system is defined properly, the system as a whole will operate correctly.

exitb 2y ago

The floppy is just a visible artifact of a system that works, but is no longer easy to modify. Old systems often didn’t abstract away the implementation details of a floppy drive, so it might expect not a block storage, but rather something that actually behaves like a drive. It’s worth noting that current state-of-the-art emulation of Commodore 64 drive is still not perfect and fully compatible with all software.

mike_hearn 2y ago

They aren't reliable. Anyone who remembers floppy disks will remember how easily damaged they were, and that was back when the equipment was new. So for "reliable" read "avoids career risk". Outside of the tech industry IT projects fail a lot, and they fail in ways that non-technical people do not/cannot/will not try to understand. From the perspective of your average middle ranking executive or civil servant any project involving computers is very likely to just randomly end up delivering nothing despite consuming tens of millions of dollars/euros. The phenomenon is utterly baffling to them and feels hopeless. Combine it with a rolling heads culture in which the organizational response to failure is firing / sidelining someone in order to show accountability (vs a rigorous post-mortem analysis), and you get a lot of organizational weirdness that boils down to everyone scrambling away from anything that involves technology modernization. At some level the reason we have such a thing as a "tech company" or "startup" is because these are what we call organizations that aren't intimidated by software projects. Government organizations are especially prone to ending up on obsolete 1980s/90s era tech because there's no market pressure or bonuses incentivizing them to improve things, because awareness of how often IT projects fail is much higher now than it was back then, and because civil servants are typically very focused on staying inside the civil service and making it to pensionable age. The bulk of their comp is weighted towards the end of their lives due to way more generous pensions than in the private sector so this gives them all an incentive to avoid any project that might have a concrete failure mode.

layer8 2y ago
> outside of the tech industry IT projects fail a lot Within the tech industry as well. Replacing a running system tends to be high-risk for various reasons.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Maybe I've been lucky but the failure rate I saw inside tech firms is much lower than the rates I've seen outside it. Yes it still happens, but it's rarer and people don't freak out about it. You don't see executive careers go down in flames because some grunt accidentally used an O(N^2) algorithm at the core of a system and the project hit some arbitrary deadline before they got it fixed. And a lot of the riskier attempts at replacing things get outsourced to startups where the risk:reward ratio is a lot healthier.