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FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

147 points by daledavies 1y ago

burnt-resistor 1y ago
For retrofit purposes, it's probably attainable to use solid state (no moving parts) floppy disk emulators that use USB thumb drives or CF/SD cards instead of error-prone, real floppy disks. Every time a floppy drive moves over a sector to read or write, it wears that area mechanically. Magnetically, bits just seem to rot from floppy disks randomly with time more likely failure mode for previously good floppies. Let me complain you about how error-prone and unreliable are real floppy disks. ):
- skissane 1y ago
  > For retrofit purposes, it's probably attainable to use solid state (no moving parts) floppy disk emulators that use USB thumb drives or CF/SD cards instead of error-prone, real floppy disks. Yes, but if it is just a PC running Windows 95, likely simpler to get the software working under newer Windows, or if worst comes to worst, keep Windows 95 and stick it in a VM. I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else. The use case where physical floppy emulators really shine is with much more exotic legacy systems. Some years ago there was a furore that the US nuclear arsenal was still being managed using 8-inch floppy disks (used in IBM Series/1s, 16-bit minicomputers from the 1970s). USAF was proud to publicly announce they’d successfully transitioned the US nuclear arsenal to be floppy-free. I don’t know if they said publicly exactly how they did it, but I suspect they kept the Series/1 minicomputers and just replaced the 8-inch floppy drives with hardware emulators (which probably each cost an utter fortune when you add up the premiums anyone will charge for it being the military, being highly classified, and above all being related to glowing things that go boom)
  - looofooo0 1y ago
    I guess these hardware emulators are quite cheap on aliexpress, but then obivously for anything critical...
    - timeflex 1y ago
      A hardware emulator is basically any hardware in the last decade capable of running QEMU or other virtualization solution.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > likely simpler to get the software working under newer Windows, famous last words. /s
  - sillywalk 1y ago
    > USAF was proud to publicly announce they’d successfully transitioned the US nuclear arsenal to be floppy-free. I don’t know if they said publicly exactly how they did it, They only said a “highly-secure solid state digital storage solution”. At least that's all I could find.[0] The article indicates that things get repaired down to the "component level", but specialist civilians. And this bit was interesting as well: "While SACC’s hardware is decades old, its software is constantly refreshed by young Air Force programmers who learn software development skills at Offutt’s Rapid Agile Development Lab. Most work on the software and interfaces seen by end-users like intercontinental ballistic missile launch crews, rewriting legacy code to make it more modern and sustainable, said Master Sgt. Travis Menard, 595th SCS’s programming section chief." [0] https://www.c4isrnet.com/air/2019/10/17/the-us-nuclear-forces-dr-strangelove-era-messaging-system-finally-got-rid-of-its-floppy-disks/ https://www.c4isrnet.com/air/2019/10/17/the-us-nuclear-force...
  - swells34 1y ago
    > I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else. Based on my experience with older government systems, this is likely an incorrect assumption. It was extremely popular in the 90s to create custom hardware that integrated directly to windows machines. I've had to reverse engineer so many drivers to upgrade old bespoke equipment to integrate with newer OSs
    - skissane 1y ago
      The reason why I doubt it for the FAA, is I know in the 1990s the core ATC system ran on IBM mainframes and the specialised equipment was directly or indirectly connected to the mainframes. Hence, I expect the Windows PCs were used to run terminal emulators, email/messaging, various auxiliary applications.
heisenbit 1y ago
Would you like to trust your life win95 and floppies definitely no but paper strips is something really robust and in light of crowd-strike or the outage in Newark I think a truly independent backup ‚system‘ is a good idea. Particularly as the next system will come with some early bugs.
jessekv 1y ago
> While this likely saved them from the disastrous CrowdStrike outage that had a massive global impact I imagine log4j wasn't a problem either.
tsuru 1y ago
So what does a modern ATC look like? can winehq save the day in the interim or in the transition?
- johnisgood 1y ago
  Check out https://vatsim.net/docs/policy/approved-software https://vatsim.net/docs/policy/approved-software, of course this is for VATSIM only, but you should still get an idea. I use Euroscope. If anyone knows what ATC software they are using in the wild, let me know. A screenshot would suffice.
  - malteeez 1y ago
    Some european countries are in the process of switching over to iCAS made by indra. A press release for that included a picture https://www.dfs.de/homepage/de/medien/presse/2023/30-03-2023-muenchner-fluglotsen-am-arbeitsplatz-der-zukunft/ https://www.dfs.de/homepage/de/medien/presse/2023/30-03-2023... There is also some work by the germans on moving the TID part to a web-based approach.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      I cannot see much. :( Looks like Euroscope.
      - malteeez 1y ago
        [dead]
- fallingknife 1y ago
  Setting a protocol to handle air traffic control and collision prevention in airspace around airports is a 100% automatable problem. You don't even need a centralized control system. This can be handled entirely with software running on each plane. Same way a flock of birds can fly and never collide with each other.
  - 1y ago
jeffreygoesto 1y ago
The latest "Last Week Tonight" episode on Air Traffic Controllers is quite interesting. Learned about the floppy discs there.
- jillesvangurp 1y ago
  He also pointed at the root cause and possible solution there. Which is re-categorizing spending on this as essential instead of as something that's nice to have and becomes the victim of cuts almost immediately after anytime some budget is actually allocated. An interesting point here is maybe that there's a whole world outside the US where planes fly and communicate. For example the EU has its own issues on this front but is modernizing what it does. Airspaces here are pretty dense and busy. It's not necessary to reinvent a lot of wheels here. The US could just look across its borders and learn from what is being done there. As soon as there's a reasonable budget for this, there are all sorts of perfectly reasonable things that can be done. The core issue isn't technical.
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    > For example the EU has its own issues on this front but is modernizing what it does. The EU has been almost single-handedly designing the international interoperability standards for the kinds of information that the US uses floppies to move around. I'm not sure any country still remembers the lessons that would be useful for the US on this one situation.
- RandomBacon 1y ago
  > floppy discs disc - optical disk - not optical Eg.: floppy disks and DVD discs
  - bmacho 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc
latexr 1y ago
> This is the most important infrastructure project that we’ve had in this country for decades. Everyone agrees — this is non-partisan. Everyone knows we have to do it. Considering the current political climate and rampant government cuts to important services, I very much doubt “everyone agrees” and that this is the best time to be planning such an important transition.
- sverhagen 1y ago
  Yeah, couldn't this easily split in a group supporting the FAA to implement a better system, versus a group trying to contract it out to the private sector? Before you know it, IBM* is printing money again. (* substitute with Evil Corp of your choosing)
  - mcv 1y ago
    It's going to be all Windows 11 of course. Including all the additional services nobody ever needed but now suddenly needs.
- eviks 1y ago
  Of course, that's why he had to say those words in the first place
  - latexr 1y ago
    And then what? Those words mean nothing to the people with the most power and motivation (or lack of care) to derail the whole thing. It’s about as effective as placing a monkey in a porcelain shop then walking away while commenting loudly “Now now, it is very important none of the porcelain breaks, everyone knows it must remain intact”. The monkey doesn’t give a shit. Butchering a proverb: “The best time to reorganise your porcelain store was before you bought a monkey. The second best time is after you sell the monkey.”
    - eviks 1y ago
      And then nothing? Do you seriously expect people to only say words that are effective at changing the world?
ThinkBeat 1y ago
A first step to mitigate some of the risk would be to move the system to a virtualised system. This could be in each location or more centralised which would make the maintenance of the fleet of old computers easier. Floppy can be copied to hard disks and will not have to worry about failures of mechanical parts involved in reading floppy drives. Developing a brand new system would take quit a lot of time. As all systems du if they need extreme uptime. Starting that effort now is ok but I would guess it would be take at leas a couple of years. Significant work would have to understand in detail what the current system does and does not do, and then map out what a system should do.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  I wonder if anyone makes a virtual floppy drive that replicates the performance characteristics. I.e. to avoid a faster virtual drive uncovering dormant race conditions. Something like a developer assuming "I have enough time to do this processing before the disc makes another rotation" etc.
  - Craighead 1y ago
    [dead]
  - guax 1y ago
    I think any of the "off the shelf" gotek emulators should suffice for this. They're made for people to keep playing games on old hardware. I would assume copy protection and other shenanigans would be the creme de la creme of abusing the hardware. This is to get rid of the media only. You'll still be using the original compute hardware. But it would be an interesting step. I feel that most of the desire to upgrade is cultural and not technical. People love to talk about the floppies being used while its just a small part of the equation. Cost and risk of creating a new system with the same reliability expectations is hard when the incumbent has decades of iteration. For systems that do not require more performance or energy efficiency the accounting on upgrading looks very different.
  - shakna 1y ago
    Probably MartyPC [0]. It replicates most of the physical aspects of devices. > In May 2023, MartyPC became the first PC emulator capable of emulating every effect in the PC demo Area 5150. [0] https://martypc.net/ https://martypc.net/
DebtDeflation 1y ago
As of the early 2000s, ATC was still using vacuum tubes. In fact, the FAA was the single biggest buyer of vacuum tubes in the world at the time, almost all of them sourced from former Soviet bloc countries. I think they've all been replaced by now, but I can't say that with 100% certainty.
- Simulacra 1y ago
  Which is what baffles me about the current situation and gives me a lot of hope for this effort. We should've been updating this stuff in the 90s, but successive administrations of both parties have just passed the ball on this one.
  - mpweiher 1y ago
    Er...they actually tried and failed. "I stopped counting long ago, but there have been many, many attempts to try to modernize the US’s air traffic control (ATC) system over the years" https://crankyflier.com/2025/05/12/the-us-government-tries-to-fix-air-traffic-control-again/ https://crankyflier.com/2025/05/12/the-us-government-tries-t... I am sure you can find better sources as there are so many of them.
  - demosthanos 1y ago
    I see this the opposite way: kudos to the FAA for sticking it out so long on legacy hardware and software as long as they have! ATC is a safety-critical function that has what amounts to a 100% uptime requirement. Whatever system they're running currently either works or has known flaws that they know how to work around, and air traffic controllers have been trained on these systems for more than a generation now. Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date would have been foolish no matter how much funding Congress would have given them. If they're saying that they need the upgrade now, I'll trust them on that, but it was the right call to make it last.
    - csdreamer7 1y ago
      > ATC is a safety-critical function that has what amounts to a 100% uptime requirement. Whatever system they're running currently either works or has known flaws that they know how to work around, and air traffic controllers have been trained on these systems for more than a generation now. Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date would have been foolish no matter how much funding Congress would have given them. I do not have enough knowledge to disagree on this. But I will say the FAA is still on floppy disks when the US Nuclear Arsenal moved off floppies back in 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy... Yes, they have different requirements and yes, SACCS was using 8 inch IBM mainframe floppies from the 70s, but they are both 24/7 critical systems. > If they're saying that they need the upgrade now, I'll trust them on that, but it was the right call to make it last. The real answer is likely embarrassing incidents that came up during the start of this presidency. There is now political will to address it; instead of 'before' it becomes a problem. They are on Windows 95-it was budget issues.
jmclnx 1y ago
Isn't this try # 10000000 ? The problem, once Congress gets wind of the amount of real money that will need to be spent, plus the time it will really take to develop and fully test, it is cancelled. Of course I fully expect this to be TIP (Test in Production), thus for maybe 10 years, flying in the US could be very dangerous. Lets hope the pilots will be able to manually avoid other planes.
know-how 1y ago
[dead]
naveen99 1y ago
I am surprised Elon didn’t want to automate air traffic control before unsupervised fsd.
- sidibe 1y ago
  I believe his solution for ATC was to make sure they weren't hiring minorities
  - naveen99 1y ago
    But the top 1% by definition are a minority to the 99% majority ?
osigurdson 1y ago
The problem is all of the big software consultancy services are optimized to maximize revenues / minimize their own risk when working with big / dumb government agencies.
staplung 1y ago
I get that FAA hardware/software is a time-tested, safety-critical system that has resisted many prior modernization efforts but...how do other countries run their systems? Surely they're not all using floppies. I doubt there are many (any?) countries with a flight volume like the US but overall, flight safety is pretty good world-wide (again, with exceptions).
- tw04 1y ago
  Their governments fund the upgrades instead of running around claiming their flight agencies are full of corruption and inefficiency with no basis in reality. https://www.navcanada.ca/en/news/news-releases/nav-canada-and-indra-to-deploy-leading-air-traffic-management-platforms-.aspx https://www.navcanada.ca/en/news/news-releases/nav-canada-an... https://apnews.com/article/faa-firings-trump-doge-safety-airlines-27390c6a7aac58063652302df5a243d3 https://apnews.com/article/faa-firings-trump-doge-safety-air...
  - jandrewrogers 1y ago
    The upgrades have been funded for decades. It is an execution issue, not a money issue. Many other parts of the Federal government are in the same condition: software upgrades that are infinite money sinks that never produce much after decades of effort. I've worked around some of these programs. I've had visibility into some of them for 15 years over which there has been zero forward progress despite unreasonably large amounts of money being spent. It is no secret why those programs are permanently broken but no one wants to have that conversation.
    - 9283409232 1y ago
      If it's no secret then what's the reason because I don't know?
      - jandrewrogers 1y ago
        I think most takes on this are overly reductive. The whole situation is sad really. The root cause, to the extent that one exists, is that no one is accountable for successful execution in a very literal and systemic way. Some parts of the government I've worked in are worse than others, but it is endemic. This leads to a textbook case of Pournelle's Iron Law. There are no negative consequences for a handful of people aggressively maximizing their personal benefit and acquisition of power as their primary objective. This is how you get the fiefdom-building, feather-bedding, and the usual revolving-door corruption that these programs are notorious for. Most people involved in these programs aren't like that but enough people are that it is impossible for people trying to do their jobs competently to get anything done. The people that defect are the people that end up controlling the programs because that is how the incentives work. Inefficiency and corruption are a symptom, not the disease. The incentives virtually guarantee that these programs become playgrounds for sociopaths. Average workers on these programs are put in the demoralizing position of either having their good effort constantly undermined by leaders that don't care about the mission and are openly making decisions for personal benefit or to defect to the side of the sociopaths so they at least get some personal benefit out of it. Most of the best and most competent people I know eventually leave Federal service entirely. A second-order consequence of this is that over time, no one competent wants to work on the programs that are run this way. Through churn these programs slowly fill up with mostly useless seat warmers who don't mind a job where no one expects productive outcomes. It is a kind of stealth UBI for government employees. Some people request assignment to these programs. You never hear about the programs where the leadership is actually competent and cares about the objective because these actually function pretty well. But the incentives are such that this is the exception rather than the rule. I'm not even sure how you would fix it, I suspect it is politically impossible. When companies become overtly like this they tend to slowly self-immolate into irrelevancy. Governments lack these negative feedback loops in any meaningful sense.
aurizon 1y ago
That is a long lonely road these floppies have been kicked down.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
What's the actual problem with floppy disks? Is the system not performing the task it was designed for?
- Yossarrian22 1y ago
  Floppies aren’t manufactured anymore
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
    Does that matter? Manufacturing them ain't hard and current supplies are big enough to sustain the small demand. What matters is that I can buy floppies and will be able to for a very long time if not indefinitely.
    - pg_bot 1y ago
      We are running out of floppy disks. No one makes them anymore, and there is a finite supply of existing inventory.
- topspin 1y ago
  While you can still get high quality floppy disks, there is nothing wrong with them. You must handle them properly and keep them clean, but that's only a problem for children and idiots. When demand falls and they are no longer profitable to manufacture at high quality levels, low quality media dominate the supply and you have problems. I watched this happen with floppy media. When floppy disks were common in the 80's you had great quality disks from top tier Japanese manufacturers at low cost. Media failure was rare and you could rely on a disk day after day for years. Then, as demand for floppies dropped, and these manufacturers fobbed off legacy products to low cost manufacturers, floppy media became terrible. By the mid to late 90's, floppy media bought retail was very unreliable. For a brief time I was salvaging stacks of disks that came with commercial software because the software vendors were still able to secure good media, while the retail blanks you found in stores was just this side of e-waste. I used them with expensive instruments that had integral (high quality) floppy drives, long after PCs stopped using them.
ralphc 1y ago
I get having to use old software, but why did they pick Windows 95 and not NT, which is more robust?
- p_l 1y ago
  It's possible that what is actually going is that the Windows 95 serves as "bootloader" for something like VxWorks - KUKA robots with KRC-1 controllers do something similar.
ic_fly2 1y ago
What I don’t understand in such reports is why there is no mention at all how this is done in other countries. Do they all still use floppy disks? Did they do an upgrade? How did it go? Surely this would be valuable information.
- marcusb 1y ago
  Back in the 90s, a portion of Germany's ATC ran on Emacs Lisp. No floppies though. https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/do_you_use_emacs_lisp_as_a_general_purpose/gnvzisy/ https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/do_you_use_em...
- shakna 1y ago
  A considerable number of countries use systems based on ex-Eurocat now TopSky, for their air traffic controllers, which is a distributed system. Install and updates are via a registry based system, and it supports Windows, Linux, macOS - because its mostly written in Ada and R, as of 2012. (Most are running on top of Linux, as far as I'm aware). No floppy disks, no underrunning DOS, etc.
  - Narishma 1y ago
    Is this one of those things like phones or banking where the early adopters are stuck with old tech due to inertia while late adopters are using newer technology?
    - Ekaros 1y ago
      I think truth is more so that each is using contemporary technology from time the project started. So those that started later have newer. But that does not mean modern. As in current day.
    - benced 1y ago
      A lot of airports are privately or quasi privately (Canada has a non profit called NavCanada) run which allows for advance planning of CapEx instead of depending on Congress. The US system where the FAA oversees and runs ATC is, to put it nicely, unique.
branon 1y ago
What are the chances they ditch floppies on the hardware end and switch to GNU/Linux running DOSBox to preserve the software stack? Presumably (hopefully) the existing system is airgapped in some way or otherwise restricted to communication with other ATC systems, so DOSBox-X running Win95/98[1] could act as a drop-in replacement for the software side... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44214386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44214386
SoftTalker 1y ago
I doubt the paper strips go away. They are the fallback for knowing what sequence the airplanes are in when the screens all go dark.
- buildsjets 1y ago
  What non-pilot techies fail to comprehend is that the entire ATC system is designed to operate in a no-communication failure mode. This includes features such as the paper strips, mandatory holding points, timed approaches, clearance void times, etc. It is all designed so if you have a complete communication failure in IFR conditions you can land without hitting anyone else. Any fancy new system of, for example an in-cockpit text based clearance/routing display using an LTE network, will need to be backed up with a process that can be accomplished with a pencil, a compass, and silence. For anyone considering doing development in this space, sign up for a 20 hour instrument flying ground school, preferably one taught by a retired old fart rather than a 25 year old “instructor” with no actual experience.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    > For anyone considering doing development in this space, sign up for a 20 hour instrument flying ground school, preferably one taught by a retired old fart rather than a 25 year old “instructor” with no actual experience. That's a bit overkill in the world of DOGE. They'll just use some AI to design a system by a bunch of 20-somethings that have no experience whatsoever. Then, they'll come here and brag about it.
    - uselesswords 1y ago
      Nobody even mentioned DOGE
      - dylan604 1y ago
        Well, since nobody mentioned, then I guess that means they don't exist?
      - 1y ago
evanjrowley 1y ago
If it works, then don't change it. I would trust a floppy-powered Windows 95 system over the horror show that passes for common operating systems in 2025. What will they think of next? Adding AI to the ATC system?
- ajxs 1y ago
  Operating systems have gotten a whole lot more reliable since Windows 95. The way I remember it, Windows 98 would regularly corrupt itself and need to be manually reinstalled. I'd done it so many times that I could pretty much recite the license key from memory. Modern Linux is rock solid. Even Windows 10 is very stable. They might be 'bloated', but modern OS's are way, way more stable.
  - th0ma5 1y ago
    It was still very much like modern systems. If you didn't install, uninstall, or aggressively reconfigure things they were pretty stable, and controlled changes could be achieved. Some of the problem though was that the systems required a lot of that to do anything fun with them at home.
  - userbinator 1y ago
    corrupt itself and need to be manually reinstalled In my experience that's normally the fault of third-party software, and otherwise quite easy to determine and avoid/fix. Now OSes with more protections just hide those bugs, causing most software to regress to a barely-working state. I ran 98SE as a daily driver from late 1999 until 2010, and it was reinstalled at most 3 times, not even coinciding with hardware upgrades.
    - Osiris 1y ago
      Or of just a power outage or driver causing a loss of write back cache. 95 and 98 and ME crashed on a regular basis. I specifically remember upgrading from ME to XP and being so happy with the massively improved stability of the NT kernel over the 9x kernels. If you think that's 9x was stable and reliable, you may be thinking very nostalgicly.
kgwxd 1y ago
Still have yet to see any evidence of exactly how this tech is being used, just statements from an established liar with no qualifications and clear motives to sabotage the federal government so it can be taken over by private corporations.
asdefghyk 1y ago
Just use a floppy disk emulator
userbinator 1y ago
Aside from that, the upgrades to this critical infrastructure should be resistant to hacking and other vulnerabilities They should realise that, unlike e.g. USB drives or SSDs or even HDDs[1], floppy disks are dumb raw media and cannot contain any "hidden" behaviour, and the failure modes are well-known. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735424
- XorNot 1y ago
  CD and DVD can fill this role though. It's a damn shame optical media progress cranked down like it did.
  - trinix912 1y ago
    Wouldn't it be quite wasteful to constantly have to burn CDs for that?
  - trollbridge 1y ago
    Rewriteable or write once optical media has a rather poor service life… worse than high quality floppies.
- os2warpman 1y ago
  >floppy disks are dumb raw media and cannot contain any "hidden" behavior Look up floppy boot sector viruses.
  - userbinator 1y ago
    That's not "hidden".
    - userbinator 1y ago
      It's right in the first sector, plainly readable.
domoregood 1y ago
Next they'll eliminate the 1400 baud modems and then where will we be?
observer987 1y ago
Years of budgetary neglect have lead to this situation and it’s going to cost a huge amount of money to effectively fix it.
131hn 1y ago
It’s a great time to start a CD burner business — I foresee public market demand soon
jklowden 1y ago
> some systems can never be shut down Tomshardware could do better reporting. There is no such thing as a computer that can’t fail, or a component that can’t be replaced. Does our reporter think the entire system was installed 25 years ago, and not one component has been replaced since? More likely it’s the ship of Theseus, and not one component is original. I’ve replaced whole systems without interruption. You build in compatibility, then replace every computer one by one, and phase out use of the compatibility. It’s not rocket surgery. Technical sites could be superior to the reporting in the general media on technical issues. It doesn’t have to be be stenography.
- metadat 1y ago
  Minor nit: There are classes of computers which contain redundant CPUs, PSUs, memory, etc where the components are hot swappable. Very specialized and expensive hardware which is statistically unlikely to ever need a reboot! Source: My cousin used to sell these systems back in the 90's and 00's.
  - stewarts 1y ago
    IBM Mainframes have these capabilities. But yes, they're quite expensive.
- bArray 1y ago
  I think they are just trying to get across how critical this infrastructure is, it can't be powered down for several days and unscheduled maintenance is risky. The other problem they are up against is that there are not many people around that still understand how it works or what the edge cases are. Upgrading these large distributed systems can be painful. The NHS tried to upgrade their software, over £10 bn later and they abandoned it [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-system-10bn https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
os2warpman 1y ago
The reporting on this has been an atrocious, lazy, embarrassment to journalism (aka: a normal day) so I tried my best to look into it. As far as I can tell the only systems that use floppy disks are IDS-4 terminals, of which there are a couple hundred left in the US, the rest having been upgraded (to IDS-5 or similar systems) over the last 30 years. I don't know if it is small regional airports with no money, large international airports with few moments of downtime time needed for the upgrade, a mix those two, bad luck with the bureaucratic wheel-of-priorities spin, or what. But there's no context to any of these articles, only "FLOPPY DRIVES LOL" so I had to take the time to find out what systems were actually impacted. I mean, it could have been an old HP Oscilloscope in a RF rack that used floppy drives to store images and log data, or it could have been the Master Control Program of the entire air traffic control network. There's a slight difference in impact between those two. It appears as though there are multiple competitors/replacements to IDS-4 so the solution is to cut a check and block off some time on the calendar. edit: every single journalist who just grabs a couple of tweets, adds some commentary, and dusts off their hands muttering "job well done" should encased in a Lucite cube and displayed in the town square as an object of ridicule.

147 points by daledavies 1y ago

For retrofit purposes, it's probably attainable to use solid state (no moving parts) floppy disk emulators that use USB thumb drives or CF/SD cards instead of error-prone, real floppy disks. Every time a floppy drive moves over a sector to read or write, it wears that area mechanically. Magnetically, bits just seem to rot from floppy disks randomly with time more likely failure mode for previously good floppies. Let me complain you about how error-prone and unreliable are real floppy disks. ):

skissane 1y ago
> For retrofit purposes, it's probably attainable to use solid state (no moving parts) floppy disk emulators that use USB thumb drives or CF/SD cards instead of error-prone, real floppy disks. Yes, but if it is just a PC running Windows 95, likely simpler to get the software working under newer Windows, or if worst comes to worst, keep Windows 95 and stick it in a VM. I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else. The use case where physical floppy emulators really shine is with much more exotic legacy systems. Some years ago there was a furore that the US nuclear arsenal was still being managed using 8-inch floppy disks (used in IBM Series/1s, 16-bit minicomputers from the 1970s). USAF was proud to publicly announce they’d successfully transitioned the US nuclear arsenal to be floppy-free. I don’t know if they said publicly exactly how they did it, but I suspect they kept the Series/1 minicomputers and just replaced the 8-inch floppy drives with hardware emulators (which probably each cost an utter fortune when you add up the premiums anyone will charge for it being the military, being highly classified, and above all being related to glowing things that go boom)
- looofooo0 1y ago
  I guess these hardware emulators are quite cheap on aliexpress, but then obivously for anything critical...
  - timeflex 1y ago
    A hardware emulator is basically any hardware in the last decade capable of running QEMU or other virtualization solution.
- hulitu 1y ago
  > likely simpler to get the software working under newer Windows, famous last words. /s
- sillywalk 1y ago
  > USAF was proud to publicly announce they’d successfully transitioned the US nuclear arsenal to be floppy-free. I don’t know if they said publicly exactly how they did it, They only said a “highly-secure solid state digital storage solution”. At least that's all I could find.[0] The article indicates that things get repaired down to the "component level", but specialist civilians. And this bit was interesting as well: "While SACC’s hardware is decades old, its software is constantly refreshed by young Air Force programmers who learn software development skills at Offutt’s Rapid Agile Development Lab. Most work on the software and interfaces seen by end-users like intercontinental ballistic missile launch crews, rewriting legacy code to make it more modern and sustainable, said Master Sgt. Travis Menard, 595th SCS’s programming section chief." [0] https://www.c4isrnet.com/air/2019/10/17/the-us-nuclear-forces-dr-strangelove-era-messaging-system-finally-got-rid-of-its-floppy-disks/ https://www.c4isrnet.com/air/2019/10/17/the-us-nuclear-force...
- swells34 1y ago
  > I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else. Based on my experience with older government systems, this is likely an incorrect assumption. It was extremely popular in the 90s to create custom hardware that integrated directly to windows machines. I've had to reverse engineer so many drivers to upgrade old bespoke equipment to integrate with newer OSs
  - skissane 1y ago
    The reason why I doubt it for the FAA, is I know in the 1990s the core ATC system ran on IBM mainframes and the specialised equipment was directly or indirectly connected to the mainframes. Hence, I expect the Windows PCs were used to run terminal emulators, email/messaging, various auxiliary applications.

heisenbit 1y ago

Would you like to trust your life win95 and floppies definitely no but paper strips is something really robust and in light of crowd-strike or the outage in Newark I think a truly independent backup ‚system‘ is a good idea. Particularly as the next system will come with some early bugs.

jessekv 1y ago

> While this likely saved them from the disastrous CrowdStrike outage that had a massive global impact I imagine log4j wasn't a problem either.

tsuru 1y ago

So what does a modern ATC look like? can winehq save the day in the interim or in the transition?

johnisgood 1y ago
Check out https://vatsim.net/docs/policy/approved-software https://vatsim.net/docs/policy/approved-software, of course this is for VATSIM only, but you should still get an idea. I use Euroscope. If anyone knows what ATC software they are using in the wild, let me know. A screenshot would suffice.
- malteeez 1y ago
  Some european countries are in the process of switching over to iCAS made by indra. A press release for that included a picture https://www.dfs.de/homepage/de/medien/presse/2023/30-03-2023-muenchner-fluglotsen-am-arbeitsplatz-der-zukunft/ https://www.dfs.de/homepage/de/medien/presse/2023/30-03-2023... There is also some work by the germans on moving the TID part to a web-based approach.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    I cannot see much. :( Looks like Euroscope.
    - malteeez 1y ago
      [dead]
fallingknife 1y ago
Setting a protocol to handle air traffic control and collision prevention in airspace around airports is a 100% automatable problem. You don't even need a centralized control system. This can be handled entirely with software running on each plane. Same way a flock of birds can fly and never collide with each other.
- 1y ago

jeffreygoesto 1y ago

The latest "Last Week Tonight" episode on Air Traffic Controllers is quite interesting. Learned about the floppy discs there.

jillesvangurp 1y ago
He also pointed at the root cause and possible solution there. Which is re-categorizing spending on this as essential instead of as something that's nice to have and becomes the victim of cuts almost immediately after anytime some budget is actually allocated. An interesting point here is maybe that there's a whole world outside the US where planes fly and communicate. For example the EU has its own issues on this front but is modernizing what it does. Airspaces here are pretty dense and busy. It's not necessary to reinvent a lot of wheels here. The US could just look across its borders and learn from what is being done there. As soon as there's a reasonable budget for this, there are all sorts of perfectly reasonable things that can be done. The core issue isn't technical.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  > For example the EU has its own issues on this front but is modernizing what it does. The EU has been almost single-handedly designing the international interoperability standards for the kinds of information that the US uses floppies to move around. I'm not sure any country still remembers the lessons that would be useful for the US on this one situation.
RandomBacon 1y ago
> floppy discs disc - optical disk - not optical Eg.: floppy disks and DVD discs
- bmacho 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc

latexr 1y ago

> This is the most important infrastructure project that we’ve had in this country for decades. Everyone agrees — this is non-partisan. Everyone knows we have to do it. Considering the current political climate and rampant government cuts to important services, I very much doubt “everyone agrees” and that this is the best time to be planning such an important transition.

sverhagen 1y ago
Yeah, couldn't this easily split in a group supporting the FAA to implement a better system, versus a group trying to contract it out to the private sector? Before you know it, IBM* is printing money again. (* substitute with Evil Corp of your choosing)
- mcv 1y ago
  It's going to be all Windows 11 of course. Including all the additional services nobody ever needed but now suddenly needs.
eviks 1y ago
Of course, that's why he had to say those words in the first place
- latexr 1y ago
  And then what? Those words mean nothing to the people with the most power and motivation (or lack of care) to derail the whole thing. It’s about as effective as placing a monkey in a porcelain shop then walking away while commenting loudly “Now now, it is very important none of the porcelain breaks, everyone knows it must remain intact”. The monkey doesn’t give a shit. Butchering a proverb: “The best time to reorganise your porcelain store was before you bought a monkey. The second best time is after you sell the monkey.”
  - eviks 1y ago
    And then nothing? Do you seriously expect people to only say words that are effective at changing the world?

ThinkBeat 1y ago

A first step to mitigate some of the risk would be to move the system to a virtualised system. This could be in each location or more centralised which would make the maintenance of the fleet of old computers easier. Floppy can be copied to hard disks and will not have to worry about failures of mechanical parts involved in reading floppy drives. Developing a brand new system would take quit a lot of time. As all systems du if they need extreme uptime. Starting that effort now is ok but I would guess it would be take at leas a couple of years. Significant work would have to understand in detail what the current system does and does not do, and then map out what a system should do.

HPsquared 1y ago
I wonder if anyone makes a virtual floppy drive that replicates the performance characteristics. I.e. to avoid a faster virtual drive uncovering dormant race conditions. Something like a developer assuming "I have enough time to do this processing before the disc makes another rotation" etc.
- Craighead 1y ago
  [dead]
- guax 1y ago
  I think any of the "off the shelf" gotek emulators should suffice for this. They're made for people to keep playing games on old hardware. I would assume copy protection and other shenanigans would be the creme de la creme of abusing the hardware. This is to get rid of the media only. You'll still be using the original compute hardware. But it would be an interesting step. I feel that most of the desire to upgrade is cultural and not technical. People love to talk about the floppies being used while its just a small part of the equation. Cost and risk of creating a new system with the same reliability expectations is hard when the incumbent has decades of iteration. For systems that do not require more performance or energy efficiency the accounting on upgrading looks very different.
- shakna 1y ago
  Probably MartyPC [0]. It replicates most of the physical aspects of devices. > In May 2023, MartyPC became the first PC emulator capable of emulating every effect in the PC demo Area 5150. [0] https://martypc.net/ https://martypc.net/

DebtDeflation 1y ago

As of the early 2000s, ATC was still using vacuum tubes. In fact, the FAA was the single biggest buyer of vacuum tubes in the world at the time, almost all of them sourced from former Soviet bloc countries. I think they've all been replaced by now, but I can't say that with 100% certainty.

Simulacra 1y ago
Which is what baffles me about the current situation and gives me a lot of hope for this effort. We should've been updating this stuff in the 90s, but successive administrations of both parties have just passed the ball on this one.
- mpweiher 1y ago
  Er...they actually tried and failed. "I stopped counting long ago, but there have been many, many attempts to try to modernize the US’s air traffic control (ATC) system over the years" https://crankyflier.com/2025/05/12/the-us-government-tries-to-fix-air-traffic-control-again/ https://crankyflier.com/2025/05/12/the-us-government-tries-t... I am sure you can find better sources as there are so many of them.
- demosthanos 1y ago
  I see this the opposite way: kudos to the FAA for sticking it out so long on legacy hardware and software as long as they have! ATC is a safety-critical function that has what amounts to a 100% uptime requirement. Whatever system they're running currently either works or has known flaws that they know how to work around, and air traffic controllers have been trained on these systems for more than a generation now. Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date would have been foolish no matter how much funding Congress would have given them. If they're saying that they need the upgrade now, I'll trust them on that, but it was the right call to make it last.
  - csdreamer7 1y ago
    > ATC is a safety-critical function that has what amounts to a 100% uptime requirement. Whatever system they're running currently either works or has known flaws that they know how to work around, and air traffic controllers have been trained on these systems for more than a generation now. Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date would have been foolish no matter how much funding Congress would have given them. I do not have enough knowledge to disagree on this. But I will say the FAA is still on floppy disks when the US Nuclear Arsenal moved off floppies back in 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy... Yes, they have different requirements and yes, SACCS was using 8 inch IBM mainframe floppies from the 70s, but they are both 24/7 critical systems. > If they're saying that they need the upgrade now, I'll trust them on that, but it was the right call to make it last. The real answer is likely embarrassing incidents that came up during the start of this presidency. There is now political will to address it; instead of 'before' it becomes a problem. They are on Windows 95-it was budget issues.

jmclnx 1y ago

Isn't this try # 10000000 ? The problem, once Congress gets wind of the amount of real money that will need to be spent, plus the time it will really take to develop and fully test, it is cancelled. Of course I fully expect this to be TIP (Test in Production), thus for maybe 10 years, flying in the US could be very dangerous. Lets hope the pilots will be able to manually avoid other planes.

know-how 1y ago

[dead]

naveen99 1y ago

I am surprised Elon didn’t want to automate air traffic control before unsupervised fsd.

sidibe 1y ago
I believe his solution for ATC was to make sure they weren't hiring minorities
- naveen99 1y ago
  But the top 1% by definition are a minority to the 99% majority ?

osigurdson 1y ago

The problem is all of the big software consultancy services are optimized to maximize revenues / minimize their own risk when working with big / dumb government agencies.

staplung 1y ago

I get that FAA hardware/software is a time-tested, safety-critical system that has resisted many prior modernization efforts but...how do other countries run their systems? Surely they're not all using floppies. I doubt there are many (any?) countries with a flight volume like the US but overall, flight safety is pretty good world-wide (again, with exceptions).

tw04 1y ago
Their governments fund the upgrades instead of running around claiming their flight agencies are full of corruption and inefficiency with no basis in reality. https://www.navcanada.ca/en/news/news-releases/nav-canada-and-indra-to-deploy-leading-air-traffic-management-platforms-.aspx https://www.navcanada.ca/en/news/news-releases/nav-canada-an... https://apnews.com/article/faa-firings-trump-doge-safety-airlines-27390c6a7aac58063652302df5a243d3 https://apnews.com/article/faa-firings-trump-doge-safety-air...
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  The upgrades have been funded for decades. It is an execution issue, not a money issue. Many other parts of the Federal government are in the same condition: software upgrades that are infinite money sinks that never produce much after decades of effort. I've worked around some of these programs. I've had visibility into some of them for 15 years over which there has been zero forward progress despite unreasonably large amounts of money being spent. It is no secret why those programs are permanently broken but no one wants to have that conversation.
  - 9283409232 1y ago
    If it's no secret then what's the reason because I don't know?
    - jandrewrogers 1y ago
      I think most takes on this are overly reductive. The whole situation is sad really. The root cause, to the extent that one exists, is that no one is accountable for successful execution in a very literal and systemic way. Some parts of the government I've worked in are worse than others, but it is endemic. This leads to a textbook case of Pournelle's Iron Law. There are no negative consequences for a handful of people aggressively maximizing their personal benefit and acquisition of power as their primary objective. This is how you get the fiefdom-building, feather-bedding, and the usual revolving-door corruption that these programs are notorious for. Most people involved in these programs aren't like that but enough people are that it is impossible for people trying to do their jobs competently to get anything done. The people that defect are the people that end up controlling the programs because that is how the incentives work. Inefficiency and corruption are a symptom, not the disease. The incentives virtually guarantee that these programs become playgrounds for sociopaths. Average workers on these programs are put in the demoralizing position of either having their good effort constantly undermined by leaders that don't care about the mission and are openly making decisions for personal benefit or to defect to the side of the sociopaths so they at least get some personal benefit out of it. Most of the best and most competent people I know eventually leave Federal service entirely. A second-order consequence of this is that over time, no one competent wants to work on the programs that are run this way. Through churn these programs slowly fill up with mostly useless seat warmers who don't mind a job where no one expects productive outcomes. It is a kind of stealth UBI for government employees. Some people request assignment to these programs. You never hear about the programs where the leadership is actually competent and cares about the objective because these actually function pretty well. But the incentives are such that this is the exception rather than the rule. I'm not even sure how you would fix it, I suspect it is politically impossible. When companies become overtly like this they tend to slowly self-immolate into irrelevancy. Governments lack these negative feedback loops in any meaningful sense.

aurizon 1y ago

That is a long lonely road these floppies have been kicked down.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

What's the actual problem with floppy disks? Is the system not performing the task it was designed for?

Yossarrian22 1y ago
Floppies aren’t manufactured anymore
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  Does that matter? Manufacturing them ain't hard and current supplies are big enough to sustain the small demand. What matters is that I can buy floppies and will be able to for a very long time if not indefinitely.
  - pg_bot 1y ago
    We are running out of floppy disks. No one makes them anymore, and there is a finite supply of existing inventory.
topspin 1y ago
While you can still get high quality floppy disks, there is nothing wrong with them. You must handle them properly and keep them clean, but that's only a problem for children and idiots. When demand falls and they are no longer profitable to manufacture at high quality levels, low quality media dominate the supply and you have problems. I watched this happen with floppy media. When floppy disks were common in the 80's you had great quality disks from top tier Japanese manufacturers at low cost. Media failure was rare and you could rely on a disk day after day for years. Then, as demand for floppies dropped, and these manufacturers fobbed off legacy products to low cost manufacturers, floppy media became terrible. By the mid to late 90's, floppy media bought retail was very unreliable. For a brief time I was salvaging stacks of disks that came with commercial software because the software vendors were still able to secure good media, while the retail blanks you found in stores was just this side of e-waste. I used them with expensive instruments that had integral (high quality) floppy drives, long after PCs stopped using them.

ralphc 1y ago

I get having to use old software, but why did they pick Windows 95 and not NT, which is more robust?

p_l 1y ago
It's possible that what is actually going is that the Windows 95 serves as "bootloader" for something like VxWorks - KUKA robots with KRC-1 controllers do something similar.

ic_fly2 1y ago

What I don’t understand in such reports is why there is no mention at all how this is done in other countries. Do they all still use floppy disks? Did they do an upgrade? How did it go? Surely this would be valuable information.

marcusb 1y ago
Back in the 90s, a portion of Germany's ATC ran on Emacs Lisp. No floppies though. https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/do_you_use_emacs_lisp_as_a_general_purpose/gnvzisy/ https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/do_you_use_em...
shakna 1y ago
A considerable number of countries use systems based on ex-Eurocat now TopSky, for their air traffic controllers, which is a distributed system. Install and updates are via a registry based system, and it supports Windows, Linux, macOS - because its mostly written in Ada and R, as of 2012. (Most are running on top of Linux, as far as I'm aware). No floppy disks, no underrunning DOS, etc.
- Narishma 1y ago
  Is this one of those things like phones or banking where the early adopters are stuck with old tech due to inertia while late adopters are using newer technology?
  - Ekaros 1y ago
    I think truth is more so that each is using contemporary technology from time the project started. So those that started later have newer. But that does not mean modern. As in current day.
  - benced 1y ago
    A lot of airports are privately or quasi privately (Canada has a non profit called NavCanada) run which allows for advance planning of CapEx instead of depending on Congress. The US system where the FAA oversees and runs ATC is, to put it nicely, unique.

branon 1y ago

What are the chances they ditch floppies on the hardware end and switch to GNU/Linux running DOSBox to preserve the software stack? Presumably (hopefully) the existing system is airgapped in some way or otherwise restricted to communication with other ATC systems, so DOSBox-X running Win95/98[1] could act as a drop-in replacement for the software side... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44214386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44214386

SoftTalker 1y ago

I doubt the paper strips go away. They are the fallback for knowing what sequence the airplanes are in when the screens all go dark.

buildsjets 1y ago
What non-pilot techies fail to comprehend is that the entire ATC system is designed to operate in a no-communication failure mode. This includes features such as the paper strips, mandatory holding points, timed approaches, clearance void times, etc. It is all designed so if you have a complete communication failure in IFR conditions you can land without hitting anyone else. Any fancy new system of, for example an in-cockpit text based clearance/routing display using an LTE network, will need to be backed up with a process that can be accomplished with a pencil, a compass, and silence. For anyone considering doing development in this space, sign up for a 20 hour instrument flying ground school, preferably one taught by a retired old fart rather than a 25 year old “instructor” with no actual experience.
- dylan604 1y ago
  > For anyone considering doing development in this space, sign up for a 20 hour instrument flying ground school, preferably one taught by a retired old fart rather than a 25 year old “instructor” with no actual experience. That's a bit overkill in the world of DOGE. They'll just use some AI to design a system by a bunch of 20-somethings that have no experience whatsoever. Then, they'll come here and brag about it.
  - uselesswords 1y ago
    Nobody even mentioned DOGE
    - dylan604 1y ago
      Well, since nobody mentioned, then I guess that means they don't exist?
    - 1y ago

evanjrowley 1y ago

If it works, then don't change it. I would trust a floppy-powered Windows 95 system over the horror show that passes for common operating systems in 2025. What will they think of next? Adding AI to the ATC system?

ajxs 1y ago
Operating systems have gotten a whole lot more reliable since Windows 95. The way I remember it, Windows 98 would regularly corrupt itself and need to be manually reinstalled. I'd done it so many times that I could pretty much recite the license key from memory. Modern Linux is rock solid. Even Windows 10 is very stable. They might be 'bloated', but modern OS's are way, way more stable.
- th0ma5 1y ago
  It was still very much like modern systems. If you didn't install, uninstall, or aggressively reconfigure things they were pretty stable, and controlled changes could be achieved. Some of the problem though was that the systems required a lot of that to do anything fun with them at home.
- userbinator 1y ago
  corrupt itself and need to be manually reinstalled In my experience that's normally the fault of third-party software, and otherwise quite easy to determine and avoid/fix. Now OSes with more protections just hide those bugs, causing most software to regress to a barely-working state. I ran 98SE as a daily driver from late 1999 until 2010, and it was reinstalled at most 3 times, not even coinciding with hardware upgrades.
  - Osiris 1y ago
    Or of just a power outage or driver causing a loss of write back cache. 95 and 98 and ME crashed on a regular basis. I specifically remember upgrading from ME to XP and being so happy with the massively improved stability of the NT kernel over the 9x kernels. If you think that's 9x was stable and reliable, you may be thinking very nostalgicly.

kgwxd 1y ago

Still have yet to see any evidence of exactly how this tech is being used, just statements from an established liar with no qualifications and clear motives to sabotage the federal government so it can be taken over by private corporations.

asdefghyk 1y ago

Just use a floppy disk emulator

userbinator 1y ago

Aside from that, the upgrades to this critical infrastructure should be resistant to hacking and other vulnerabilities They should realise that, unlike e.g. USB drives or SSDs or even HDDs[1], floppy disks are dumb raw media and cannot contain any "hidden" behaviour, and the failure modes are well-known. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735424

XorNot 1y ago
CD and DVD can fill this role though. It's a damn shame optical media progress cranked down like it did.
- trinix912 1y ago
  Wouldn't it be quite wasteful to constantly have to burn CDs for that?
- trollbridge 1y ago
  Rewriteable or write once optical media has a rather poor service life… worse than high quality floppies.
os2warpman 1y ago
>floppy disks are dumb raw media and cannot contain any "hidden" behavior Look up floppy boot sector viruses.
- userbinator 1y ago
  That's not "hidden".
  - userbinator 1y ago
    It's right in the first sector, plainly readable.

domoregood 1y ago

Next they'll eliminate the 1400 baud modems and then where will we be?

observer987 1y ago

Years of budgetary neglect have lead to this situation and it’s going to cost a huge amount of money to effectively fix it.

131hn 1y ago

It’s a great time to start a CD burner business — I foresee public market demand soon

jklowden 1y ago

> some systems can never be shut down Tomshardware could do better reporting. There is no such thing as a computer that can’t fail, or a component that can’t be replaced. Does our reporter think the entire system was installed 25 years ago, and not one component has been replaced since? More likely it’s the ship of Theseus, and not one component is original. I’ve replaced whole systems without interruption. You build in compatibility, then replace every computer one by one, and phase out use of the compatibility. It’s not rocket surgery. Technical sites could be superior to the reporting in the general media on technical issues. It doesn’t have to be be stenography.

metadat 1y ago
Minor nit: There are classes of computers which contain redundant CPUs, PSUs, memory, etc where the components are hot swappable. Very specialized and expensive hardware which is statistically unlikely to ever need a reboot! Source: My cousin used to sell these systems back in the 90's and 00's.
- stewarts 1y ago
  IBM Mainframes have these capabilities. But yes, they're quite expensive.
bArray 1y ago
I think they are just trying to get across how critical this infrastructure is, it can't be powered down for several days and unscheduled maintenance is risky. The other problem they are up against is that there are not many people around that still understand how it works or what the edge cases are. Upgrading these large distributed systems can be painful. The NHS tried to upgrade their software, over £10 bn later and they abandoned it [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-system-10bn https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

os2warpman 1y ago

The reporting on this has been an atrocious, lazy, embarrassment to journalism (aka: a normal day) so I tried my best to look into it. As far as I can tell the only systems that use floppy disks are IDS-4 terminals, of which there are a couple hundred left in the US, the rest having been upgraded (to IDS-5 or similar systems) over the last 30 years. I don't know if it is small regional airports with no money, large international airports with few moments of downtime time needed for the upgrade, a mix those two, bad luck with the bureaucratic wheel-of-priorities spin, or what. But there's no context to any of these articles, only "FLOPPY DRIVES LOL" so I had to take the time to find out what systems were actually impacted. I mean, it could have been an old HP Oscilloscope in a RF rack that used floppy drives to store images and log data, or it could have been the Master Control Program of the entire air traffic control network. There's a slight difference in impact between those two. It appears as though there are multiple competitors/replacements to IDS-4 so the solution is to cut a check and block off some time on the calendar. edit: every single journalist who just grabs a couple of tweets, adds some commentary, and dusts off their hands muttering "job well done" should encased in a Lucite cube and displayed in the town square as an object of ridicule.