System has been running on floppy disks for 50 years… people : “Floppy disks are not reliable!”
<sigh>
Are they finally switching to zip drives now?
Interesting, didn’t know we were like Japan like that
Somebody out there is thinking “why not vibe code it and get it done by AI fast?”
I hear AI would make a great traffic controller. Surely you wouldn’t regret replacing human traffic controllers with AI.
Old tech is solid and reliable. Do you really want the modern tech ethos of “move fast and break stuff” to apply to Air Traffic Control? I wouldn’t trust the big tech companies to write software for red-lights without killing people.
First time I’ve heard a floppy disk being referred to as reliable
Floppy disks are not reliable!
I grew up with floppy discs. Once we had hard shells on them they were fine. I never had one fail.
Did have some MBR viruses back in the day though.
Moving away from floppy discs in 2026 is moving fast and breaking things? Peak Lemmy moment.
Old tech still requires maintenance and replacement parts. This tech is so old that they can’t effectively provide either. I 100% agree with you that you don’t want to “move fast and break things” but there does need to be a program to upgrade over time to deal with the maintenance and replacement problems, as well as improve capabilities and safety. The fact that some ATC systems completely crashed in recent months, leaving air traffic in a very dangerous state, is evidence of this problem.
Sorry but ‘Floppy’ and ‘reliable’ in the same sentence… is odd.
The floppy disk is 60 years old. In which universe is migrating away from 60-year-old technology “moving fast and breaking stuff”?!
Fuck. You just reminded me of my age.
Yeah, me too. I can’t move fast anymore, but I can certainly break stuff 🤣
Your own back and hips?
What are they moving to? Because that’s what the comment is referencing. The new tech they are moving to, not the old tech.
I know it’s a rethorical question but from what I’ve seen they updated their “information display”.
In my country our equivalent is an in-house Java software running on Linux thin clients. The software basically shows meteorological information, runways status, airspace status and stuff like that, so it is connected to a network in order to receive those informations.
So I’m wondering why FAA used the floppy disks? Was it to update the information? MET is updated every 30 minutes, day and night. That’s a handful of manual updates to do…
PS: Their brand new "Enterprise Information Display System (E-IDS)” is what we do in Europe since, uhh, 30 years ?
Why do the banks use COBOL? Why does NASA use FORTRAN?
Because they didn’t upgrade their systems in time while deep knowledge of these systems were intact and would have made upgrading seamlessly much easier. Now they have black boxes that no one truly understands anymore, so they’re paralyzed by fear and that’s what’s keeping them trapped in these old systems.
No, because when infrastructure is sophisticated, critical, and expensive enough, you don’t just go around replacing it.
I bring up Legacy Code for a reason. as one of the few organizations in the world that can spend so many millions of dollars on code that they can virtually guarantee that it’s bug free.
And as for the cobalt code in the banking industry, the entire world could shut down if things went wrong by replacing it.
Aviation use X400 and X500 which is bank SMTP.
It’s not so much that new tech is bad … new tech could be made to be ten times safer than what we have now.
The problem is that the new tech is controlled by psychopaths who want to squeeze as much profit out of everything imaginable … imagine all that new tech controlling air traffic but its all locked up by proprietary software that would hold entire airports, agencies and governments hostage, or be made available to the highest bidder and even for international opponents or enemies … and all of it up for grabs for profit and regardless of morals, ethics or human decency.
Floppy discs reliable? I remember mine not working if I transported them in my backpack when it was cold outside. They came back to life when “thawed”, but I’d prefer airliners use something better!
Clay slates have rather modest data density, but reliability is top.
Oh yeah then where are the other parts of the Gilgamesh saga? Check mate big slate.
You don’t have copyright-scmiopyright permission to read it anyway. It isn’t in the public domain – 100500 years haven’t passed for that.
These don’t get transported like that. We’re talking climate control and backups and so on. It’s reliable because the failure rates and causes are known and accounted for.
You don’t understand what I mean, floppy discs lose memory easily. It’s not a safe storage medium. Everyone who has used them knows this. Use the paper with holes in instead 😁 can’t be that hard to push some kilobytes onto it 😂
Lol.
Everyone who has used them knows this.
I started out on 8" floppy disk back in the day when disks were actually floppy. Switch to 5.25" and then 3.5" before going to CD-ROMs.
Back then people were storing them in paper sleeves (or cardboard) and your average kid was handling them with dirty hands and ignoring pretty much anything and everything that caused them to degrade including touching the interior film. I fondly remember using the spring loaded shutter or a 3.5" as a fidget toy.
I’m well aware of the failures these things have and the way they are required to be kept to account for that including backups, and care instructions.
The point isn’t that they fail. They have known failure rates and known failure causes. Protocols can be put in place to account for literally all of that and this is what makes the medium reliable and cost effective for this use case.
You’re talking to someone who was loading navigation data and software updates onto planes with 3.5" floppy until fairly recently in their career.
This is as much about the hardware in use as it is about the storage medium. Upgrading depends on some things.
Cost
Upgradability path availability over full on replacement and the downtime of doing so.
The ability to make what you are upgrading to stable, secure, and backwards compatible to a degree.
All of those things have to be taken into consideration and accounted for.
Lol I’m a senior software engineer and I used 5" floppies I mean it was in my post if you read it or maybe it’s your memory that has run its course 😱 (BTW people ruined floppies putting their thumb on the read area, or ruined them by fidgeting with the 3"5 ones, what’s your point about that?) no need to come to the rescue of an ancient crap organisation (computer wise) or is it yours or something 😂
One of us works in this industry and understands what’s going on and the other of us is currently trying to throw their weight around because they didn’t like an anecdote and didn’t read the article.
If we’re going to start throwing around ageism, I’m done with this conversation. You have a nice day.
Yeah goodbye goalpoast shifter lol.
Sounds like they actually only entered the 20th century.
This is going to devastate the floppy disc industry.
Goodbye S&P500 floppy was its last true champion.
Yeah, didn’t Japan recently make a move away from floppys too for sone goverment stuff? Big floppy is going to take a dive on the stock market.
Other countries would be horrified to hear that critical infrastructure had been so neglected, but this is just another day in the US of fucking A
It really is a crazy country. I can’t imagine the stress of living there.
It’s fairly typical of aviation around the world
Old is safe, and if it’s reliable, why change it?
We just add new layers on top of the old system
For the record, whole lot of planes using floppy disks too
The US needed floppy disc to launch nukes until a few years ago.
Still, not really US exclusive. The German Navy also still uses them.
There was actually a benefit to being behind the curve on this.
The scheduling is done on modern machines, the actual flight control console is a glorified comms station with a very beefy audio recorder.
It’s built to last, and to be as reliable as possible, while still being repairable by a skilled technician.
Any update needs to be as solid and reliable as what it replaces. That’s the key, not being advanced or some shit.
ICAO world is behind the curve yeah but not a century behind.
OPS tech is old protocols like X25 and X400 but on IP, not on serial cables and switches.
Networks are using fiber channels, servers are using VMs, kubernetes clusters and stuff like that. It’s old tech on modern hardware. Even the voice coms went full VOIP (at least for gnd-gnd com) during the last decade.
Yes we stay behind the tech curve on purpose, but FAA lagging so much behind the rest of the world is just another proof of their lack of investment.
I’m sorry, what?
Apparently they believe an unreliable storage medium that hasn’t been manufactured in more than twenty years may not be trustworthy enough for a life critical system anymore. That, or finding “new” floppies is more expensive than making the switch…
You need a computer to do a thing, ALL you want is the command prompt and thing doing.exe
Can’t hack a floppy disk remotely, it’s the OG air gap
Actually, I’m pretty sure the air gap is the OG air gap.
Booo
I don’t trust it happening well under Trump so I’m going to take this as a sign to be prepared for far more crashes in the next two years.
More and more I’m thinking if I need to travel, I’ll walk.
To Hawaii???
I’ll be a wayfinder, like Moana!
I admit, there’s a few kinks in my plan I’ll need to work out.
Holy smokes, I thought Cobol was archaic
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
That kind of bullshit thinking is why I have to do shitty half-assed solutions because I need to work around unsupported equipment that’s 50 years old and was EOL’ed three decades ago. At some point you absolutely should upgrade even if it isn’t broken.
The absolute #1 priority in aviation is safety. Old, stable systems are safer. Just add new systems in parallel for new features
It fact you just gave us the true answer.
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, so now when it breaks it can’t be fixed.
Lol I use software every day that was written in COBOL. It would cost billions to replace. So leadership never wants to add that expense to their budget so they just hobble along and leave it for the next people.
I’m pretty sure the software I use for work is written in COBOL too, but they’re currently in a multi-year rollout of a modern replacement. So that’s good, I guess.
