5 ms·

The PC seems alright to me (after all, how much CPU do you need to open a bridge...), but the floppies seem a bit fragile and unreliable, they lose data pretty

The PC seems alright to me (after all, how much CPU do you need to open a bridge...), but the floppies seem a bit fragile and unreliable, they lose data pretty fast.

DSMan195276 13y ago
That's what I'm thinking too. The fact that it's old and running MS-DOS doesn't seem like much of a big deal to me considering it's not networked and only has one job to do that it's already capable of doing. They should probably just go get a cheep IDE HDD, copy the floppy onto it and boot from there. But other then that, I don't see tons of issues. This does however seem like a fairly obvious use-case for an embedded solution. No floppies, no moving parts, etc.. It would last much longer then this computer will. It's not like the computer was doing much anyway (I mean, besides signaling motors, I'm not really sure what the computer was even doing).
- pantalaimon 13y ago
  An IDE Flash drive would be even better, they are pretty cheap as well.
  - mark-r 13y ago
    I had no idea IDE flash drives existed until you said so, but indeed there's quite a few. Just for situations such as this probably.
- gaius 13y ago
  I used to work on a Unix system with the OS on one floppy drive and the swap file on the other.
tanzam75 13y ago
> The PC seems alright to me (after all, how much CPU do you need to open a bridge...), but the floppies seem a bit fragile and unreliable, they lose data pretty fast. Floppy disks are fragile, but consider the application. They're not trying to archive data for 100 years. They just need to be able to load the bridge control program when the computer boots up. If a floppy disk fails, just take it out and insert a duplicate. There are textile mills that are still running their machines off 3.5" floppies. When they heard that Sony ended production of 3.5" floppies, they simply went out and bought the last production run. Put them in climate-controlled storage, and they had enough to use for the remaining life of their machines.

The PC seems alright to me (after all, how much CPU do you need to open a bridge...), but the floppies seem a bit fragile and unreliable, they lose data pretty fast.

DSMan195276 13y ago

That's what I'm thinking too. The fact that it's old and running MS-DOS doesn't seem like much of a big deal to me considering it's not networked and only has one job to do that it's already capable of doing. They should probably just go get a cheep IDE HDD, copy the floppy onto it and boot from there. But other then that, I don't see tons of issues. This does however seem like a fairly obvious use-case for an embedded solution. No floppies, no moving parts, etc.. It would last much longer then this computer will. It's not like the computer was doing much anyway (I mean, besides signaling motors, I'm not really sure what the computer was even doing).

pantalaimon 13y ago
An IDE Flash drive would be even better, they are pretty cheap as well.
- mark-r 13y ago
  I had no idea IDE flash drives existed until you said so, but indeed there's quite a few. Just for situations such as this probably.
gaius 13y ago
I used to work on a Unix system with the OS on one floppy drive and the swap file on the other.

tanzam75 13y ago

> The PC seems alright to me (after all, how much CPU do you need to open a bridge...), but the floppies seem a bit fragile and unreliable, they lose data pretty fast. Floppy disks are fragile, but consider the application. They're not trying to archive data for 100 years. They just need to be able to load the bridge control program when the computer boots up. If a floppy disk fails, just take it out and insert a duplicate. There are textile mills that are still running their machines off 3.5" floppies. When they heard that Sony ended production of 3.5" floppies, they simply went out and bought the last production run. Put them in climate-controlled storage, and they had enough to use for the remaining life of their machines.