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posted by janrinok on Saturday October 26, @09:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the flimsily-walled-garden dept.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/212-million-contract-will-finally-get-san-francisco-trains-off-floppy-disks/

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) board has agreed to spend $212 million to get its Muni Metro light rail off floppy disks.

The Muni Metro's Automatic Train Control System (ATCS) has required 5¼-inch floppy disks since 1998, when it was installed at San Francisco's Market Street subway station. The system uses three floppy disks for loading DOS software that controls the system's central servers.
[...]
After starting initial planning in 2018, the SFMTA originally expected to move to a floppy-disk-free train control system by 2028. But with COVID-19 preventing work for 18 months, the estimated completion date was delayed.

On October 15, the SFMTA moved closer to ditching floppies when its board approved a contract with Hitachi Rail for implementing a new train control system that doesn't use floppy disks, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
[...]
Further illustrating the light rail's dated tech, the current ATCS was designed to last 20 to 25 years, meaning its expected expiration date was in 2023. The system still works fine, but the risk of floppy disk data degradation and challenges in maintaining expertise in 1990s programming languages have further encouraged the SFMTA to seek upgrades.
[...]
The SFMTA plans to spend $700 million (including the $212 million Hitachi contract) to overhaul the light rail's control system. This includes replacing the loop cable system for sending data across the servers and trains. The cables are said to be a more pressing concern than the use of floppy disks. The aging cables are fragile, with "less bandwidth than an old AOL dial-up modem," Roccaforte previously told Ars.
[...]
The SFMTA's website says that the current estimated completion date for the complete overhaul is "2033/2034."
[...]
Various other organizations have also been slow to ditch the dated storage format, including Japan, which only stopped using floppy disks in governmental systems in June, and the German navy, which is still trying to figure out a replacement for 8-inch floppies.

Related Stories

US Nuclear Missile Silos Use 8" Floppy Disks 51 comments

Ars Technica reports that the US government built facilities for the Minuteman missiles in the 1960s and 1970s and although the missiles have been upgraded numerous times to make them safer and more reliable, the bases themselves haven't changed much and there isn't a lot of incentive to upgrade them. ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein told Leslie Stahl from "60 Minutes" that the bases have extremely tight IT and cyber security, because they're not Internet-connected and they use such old hardware and software. "A few years ago we did a complete analysis of our entire network," says Weinstein. "Cyber engineers found out that the system is extremely safe and extremely secure in the way it's developed." While on the base, missileers showed Stahl the 8-inch floppy disks, marked "Top Secret," which are used with the computer that handles what was once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), a communication system that delivers launch commands to US missile forces. Later, in an interview with Weinstein, Stahl described the disk she was shown as "gigantic," and said she had never seen one that big. Weinstein explained, "Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world."

Files Recovered from Nearly 200 Floppy Disks Belonging to Star Trek Creator 23 comments

Ars Technica has a short article about the recovery of data off 200 floppy disks used by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenbery for scripts and story ideas:

The circumstances of the information recovery are particularly interesting, however. Several years after the death of Roddenberry, his estate found the 5.25-inch floppy disks. Although the Star Trek creator originally typed his scripts on typewriters, he later moved his writing to two custom-built computers with custom-made operating systems before purchasing more mainstream computers in advance of his death in 1991.

Here is the press release from DriveSavers, the company that was paid to do the recovery work.


Original Submission

An 18yo Server? Meh. Try Dozens of Thirty Year-Old Laptops Still Used 24/7 67 comments

The can of worms we opened when we learned of the server switched off after eighteen years and ten months' service is still wriggling, as a reader has contacted us to tell of nearly 30-year-old laptops still in service.

Reader "Holrum" says he has "a couple dozen Toshiba T1000 laptops from the mid [1980s] still fully functional (including floppy drives)".

The T1000 was introduced in 1987. [...] The machine was one of the very first computers to use a clamshell form factor. [...] It also offered a rather archaic LCD display, as illustrated.

[...]The machine ran MS-DOS 2.11 on a ROM [and] came with a colossal 512kB of RAM [...] and a single 3.5-inch floppy drive.

Holrum says the T1000s are taken offline every few years for just the few minutes required to replace the NiCad batteries and give them a clean before they are returned to duty as process monitoring terminals.

Previous: Beat This: Server Retired After 18 Years and 10 Months


Original Submission

The Floppotron: a Computer Hardware Orchestra 8 comments

Paweł Zadrożniak has built an impressive music machine from old computer hardware. Featuring 64 floppy drives, 8 hard disks and 2 scanners he's calling it The Floppotron.

How does it work? The principle is simple. Every device with an electric motor is able to generate a sound. Scanners and floppy drives use stepper motors to move the head with sensors which scans the image or performs read/write operations on a magnetic disk. The sound generated by a motor depends on driving speed. The higher the frequency, the greater the pitch. Hard disks use a magnet and a coil to tilt the head. When voltage is supplied for long enough, the head speeds up and hits the bound making the „drum hit" sound

Paweł's Youtube channel has an overview of the device in action and this impressive Hawaii Five-O cover.

Originally spotted on Lobste.rs.


Original Submission

The Floppy Disk Orphaned By Linux 120 comments

Retrotechtacular: The Floppy Disk Orphaned By Linux

About a week ago, Linus Torvalds made a software commit which has an air about it of the end of an era. The code in question contains a few patches to the driver for native floppy disc controllers. What makes it worthy of note is that he remarks that the floppy driver is now orphaned. Its maintainer no longer has working floppy hardware upon which to test the software, and Linus remarks that "I think the driver can be considered pretty much dead from an actual hardware standpoint", though he does point out that active support remains for USB floppy drives.

It's a very reasonable view to have arrived at because outside the realm of retrocomputing the physical rather than virtual floppy disk has all but disappeared. It's well over a decade since they ceased to be fitted to desktop and laptop computers, and where once they were a staple of any office they now exist only in the "save" icon on your wordprocessor. The floppy is dead, and has been for a long time.

Still, Linus' quiet announcement comes as a minor jolt to anyone of A Certain Age for whom the floppy disk and the computer were once inseparable.

Next thing, someone will be removing punched card and paper tape reader support. Where does it end?


Original Submission

How Did MS-DOS Decide that Two Seconds Was the Amount of Time to Keep the Floppy Disk Cache Valid? 60 comments

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

How did MS-DOS decide that two seconds was the amount of time to keep the floppy disk cache valid?

MS-DOS 2.0 contained a disk read cache, but not a disk write cache. Disk read caches are important because they avoid having to re-read data from the disk. And you can invalidate the read cache when the volume is unmounted.

But wait, you don't unmount floppy drives. You just take them out.

IBM PC floppy disk drives of this era did not have lockable doors. You could open the drive door and yank the floppy disk at any time. The specification had provisions for reporting whether the floppy drive door was open, but IBM didn't implement that part of the specification because it saved them a NAND gate. Hardware vendors will do anything to save a penny.

[...] Mark Zbikowski led the MS-DOS 2.0 project, and he sat down with a stopwatch while Aaron Reynolds and Chris Peters tried to swap floppy disks on an IBM PC as fast as they could.

They couldn't do it under two seconds.

So the MS-DOS cache validity was set to two seconds. If two disk accesses occurred within two seconds of each other, the second one would assume that the cached values were still good.

I don't know if the modern two-second cache flush policy is a direct descendant of this original office competition, but I like to think there's some connection.


Original Submission

Good News – America's Nuke Arsenal to Swap Eight-Inch Floppy Disks for Solid-State Drives 23 comments

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Good news – America's nuke arsenal to swap eight-inch floppy disks for solid-state drives

The US Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) has reportedly replaced the ancient eight-inch floppy disks it uses to store data on the US nuclear arsenal.

Defense news site C4ISRNET today cites officers from the Air Force 595th Strategic Communications Squadron – the unit that actually manages the system – in reporting that earlier this summer, the antiquated IBM floppy drives were replaced with what was described as a "highly-secure solid state digital storage solution."

[...] The eight inch disks, developed in the 1960s at IBM's San Jose skunkworks, each held about 80KB of data on the current state of the nation's nuclear forces. The drives had been among the units slated for replacement as part of a "modernization" effort.

Emphasis on the quote marks, as in this case there is still plenty of 1970s tech that is going to continue being used. The report notes that the Air Force favors the Series/1 machine for SACCS in part because the ancient machine cannot be accessed with conventional network protocols, adding extra layers of security to the program.


Original Submission

Boeing 747s Receive Critical Software Updates Over 3.5" Floppy Disks 33 comments

Pen Test Partners: Boeing 747s receive critical software updates over 3.5" floppy disks:

The eye-catching factoid emerged during a DEF CON video interview of PTP's [Pen Test Partners] Alex Lomas, where the man himself gave a walkthrough of a 747-400, its avionics bay and the flight deck.

Although airliners are not normally available to curious infosec researchers, a certain UK-based Big Airline's decision to scrap its B747 fleet gave Pen Test Partners a unique opportunity to get aboard one and have a poke about before the scrap merchants set about their grim task.

"Aircraft themselves are really expensive beasts, you know," said Lomas as he filmed inside the big Boeing. "Even if you had all the will in the world, airlines and manufacturers won't just let you pentest an aircraft because [they] don't know what state you're going to leave it in."

While giving a tour of the aircraft on video (full embed below), Lomas pointed out the navigation database loader. To readers of a certain vintage it'll look very familiar indeed.

"This database has to be updated every 28 days, so you can see how much of a chore this has to be for an engineer to visit," Lomas said, pointing out the floppy drive – which in normal operations is tucked away behind a locked panel.

Youtube Video

[...] The key question everyone wants to know the answer to, though, is whether you can hack an airliner from the cheap seats, using the in-flight entertainment (IFE) as an attack vector. Lomas observed: "Where we've gone deliberately looking, we've not found, at this point, any two-way communication between passenger domain systems like the IFE and the control domain. There is the DMZ of the information services domain that sits between the two; to jump between two layers of segregation would be tricky in my view."


Original Submission

Preserving a Floppy Disk With a Logic Analyzer and a Serial Cable 39 comments

Preserving a floppy disk with a logic analyzer and a serial cable:

Being involved with retro computers, I have a few floppy disks (of the 3.5-inch variety) that I would like to preserve as faithfully as possible. Of course, I know there are dedicated devices for doing that, such as the Kryoflux or the SuperCard Pro. But it occurred to me that I already own the required hardware to capture the low-level data from a floppy disk: my Saleae Logic 8 logic analyzer.

Side note: While I can only highly recommend the Saleae analyzers for their features and easy-to-use software, the things described here can also be done with other logic analyzers – including those available for less than 10 € from your favorite Chinese online store – and using, for example, the free Sigrok software.

Contrary to more modern mass storage devices such as ATA hard drives or USB sticks, the interface to a floppy drive is much more low-level. E.g., you can ask a modern hard drive to read sector 1337 and it will return you the bytes stored in that sector. In contrast, as soon as it is selected for reading and the disk is rotating, a floppy drive will simply give you a pulse each time the magnetic flux changes, i.e. whenever the magnetic field changes orientation. It is important to know that the magnetic field orientation does not directly represent the individual bits that are stored on the disk. Instead, an encoding scheme is always used. The details of the encoding differ between systems – which is why you cannot read an Amiga disk in an Atari ST, for example. Regardless of the implementation, the encoding always needs to take care of several things: 1. Encode the data bits, obviously. 2. Clock recovery. This is essential because different drives may rotate at slightly different speeds and the floppy disk controller thus needs to determine the actual data rate. 3. Marking the start of a sector. This is often achieved by flux patterns that do not occur in regular data.

Raise your hand if you remember storing data on a floppy disk. Or was that on a floppy disc?


Original Submission

Floppotron 3.0 13 comments

http://silent.org.pl/home/2022/06/13/the-floppotron-3-0/

The Floppotron has been upgraded to version 3.0. It's a very amusing project that has been going on for many years now.

The machine evolved into a relatively large system with multiple custom circuit boards and 3D-printed parts. While making the new Floppotron, one of the main priorities (if not the main) was finishing it in reasonable time. It's still a hobby project made after hours and not something commercial or mass produced, so you will find some nice solution as well as some janky, quick-and-dirty ones – and that's the beauty of hobby projects. Let's get a little more technical. To explain how the system works, I'll go through the overview first and then will get into details of each individual block. Here's a simplified schematic of the machine.

To make the old computer hardware play, we need a set of electronic controllers mentioned before but also a proper music (musical sequence) to play. A melody is encoded as a sequence of MIDI events, the same format as all digital synthesizers use. MIDI does not carry any actual audio data, but just short events, like pressing a piano key or twisting a control knob – you can think of it as a digital form of sheet music. Those events are send from the computer to the gateway using USB to MIDI adapter. The gateway is a custom nRF52 microcontroller based device which sits between the PC with MIDI adapter and the network of „instrument" controllers. It receives MIDI data and converts that data to RS-485-based internal protocol which can encapsulate MIDI and some extra stuff. The gateway, protocol and reasoning is described in further section. Those messages are picked by controllers which will turn the digital information into a sound by driving the electric motors or moving the hard disk heads. The controller consists of a common MCU board with Nordic nRF52832 chip and a driver boards specific to the „instrument", like floppy drive string, flatbed scanner or a hard drive. If you're wandering why there is a Bluetooth-enabled chip – I'll explain it too, but let's talk about how the sound is created first. [...]

https://www.youtube.com/user/sh4dowww90/videos

We know that most people have seen the earlier versions but wait until you see version 3 - including smoke effects! But my personal favourite remains Bohemian Rhapsody - oh those dial tones!


Original Submission

Japan's Digital Minister 'Declares a War' on Floppy Disks 18 comments

Japan's Digital Minister 'Declares a War' on Floppy Disks:

Japan, a country known for advancing some of the world's most innovative and quirky tech, is preparing to launch an all out "war" against the humble floppy disk.

Taro Kono, the country's newly appointed Digital Minister, bellowed out his battle cry on Tuesday, via Twitter. According to Kono, floppy disks—along with other dated tech like CDs and MiniDiscs —are still required for around 1,900 government procedures.

Kono's vow to purge the government of the 50 plus year old floppy tech comes amid a broader effort to modernize the way people in Japan submit applications and other forms. The digital minister said his crusade has the backing of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, according to a press conference viewed by Bloomberg.

This isn't the first time Kono's lashed out at perceived inefficiencies weighing down Japan's government bureaucracy. He's previously taken aim at fax machines and traditional hanko carved stamps.

"I'm looking to get rid of the fax machine, and I still plan to do that," Kono said.


Original Submission

The Last Man Selling Floppy Disks Says He Still Receives Orders From Airlines 18 comments

The last man selling floppy disks says he still receives orders from airlines:

Do you remember floppy disks? The archaic storage device used to ruled computers of the 1980s and 1990s, but a good number of you reading this may have never seen or used one before. Surprisingly though, they still hold a place in one specific and unlikely setting: airlines.

Long before the days of SSDs, USB drives, or even CD and DVDs, floppy disks used to rule the computer world. There's a high chance that you haven't used a floppy in a decade or two, if ever. The legacy medium was eventually replaced by newer and better technology until it simply fell into a state of complete extinction -- or so we thought.

Tom Persky, founder of floppydisk.com, doesn't agree with the idea that floppy disks are "useless" or "extinct." Tom regularly repairs, recycles, and sells floppy disks to anyone who may want their hands on the old technology. The site even has that old retro feel of old websites from the 1990s and early 2000s, as shown below.

[...] Workers in the medical field are also common visitors, as some devices used on patients still use floppy disks to this day, over 50 years after their invention. There's also people, whom he calls "hobbyists," who flock to the site to "buy 10, 20, or maybe 50 floppy disks." These groups of customers are certainly interesting, but Tom emphasizes one workplace that constantly purchases new floppy disks: airlines.

Airlines have a high demand for floppy disks, and they serve as a significant portion of Persky's sales through floppydisk.com. "Take the airline industry for example. Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in the avionics. That's a huge consumer." To put that in context, in 2020, the total number of planes in the US commercial aircraft fleet was 7,690, and that number has likely grown since Aeroweb posted those numbers.


Original Submission

Chuck E. Cheese Still Uses Floppy Disks in 2023, but Not for Long 8 comments

Chuck E. Cheese still uses floppy disks in 2023, but not for long:

On Sunday, a Chuck E. Cheese employee named Stewart Coonrod posted a TikTok video that documents the process of installing a new song-and-dance show on an old Chuck E. Cheese animatronics system—a process that involves a 3.5-inch floppy disk and two DVDs. Coonrod says it is the last update before his store undergoes a remodel that will remove the animatronics altogether.

Coonrod's Chuck E. Cheese location in Darien, Illinois, was originally a Show-Biz Pizza restaurant but changed over to Chuck E. Cheese branding in 1991. It includes a single Chuck E. Cheese animatronics character (called "Cyberamics" in the parlance of the company) surrounded by four video screens in a setup called "Studio C," first introduced in 1998.

Currently, those 25-year-old setups are being phased out nationwide in favor of a remodel that replaces the animatronics character with a dance floor. It's the end of the line for Cyberamics, but a few stores still use them, and the parent company ships out updates on floppy and DVD to match the legacy system.


Original Submission

Where Are Floppy Disks Today? Planes, Trains, And All These Other Places 5 comments

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

I don't remember when I first started using a floppy disk in the mid-70s. It was either installing firmware on IBM S/370 mainframes or on a dedicated library workstation to create Library of Congress catalog records. Oh, the exciting life I've led! In either case, it would have been a single-sided, 8-inch floppy disk, which held an amazing 79.7 KiloBytes (KB) of data.

[...] As personal computers gained popularity in the 1970s, the floppy disk moved from my world of mainframes and workstations to PCs. There, it found its place as an affordable and accessible storage solution. 

Then, in 1976, a guy named Steve Wozniak wanted to add a floppy drive to his next computer. His buddy, Steve Jobs, got a 5.25-inch floppy disk from Shugart's new company, Shugart Associates, in 1976, and after a lot of hacking, Woz got the first floppy drive to run on what would become the Apple II

[...] It wasn't just major companies, either. Floppy disks enabled anyone to create and sell programs, which sparked the freeware and shareware movements. They also enabled people to share data easily for the first time. Long before we were using modems and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) to share programs, pictures, and data, we would share them by "sneakerware." That is, literally walking the information from one computer to another by hand carrying disks. 

[...] By the early 2000s, floppy disks had become increasingly rare, used primarily with legacy hardware and industrial equipment. Sony manufactured the last new floppy disk in 2011

Despite its obsolescence, the floppy disk's legacy endures. Its iconic design has become a symbol of data storage, and the floppy disk icon still appears on many computer desktops as the file-saving symbol.

Japan's Digital Minister Claims Victory Against Floppy Disks 6 comments

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Japan's digital minister, Taro Kono, confirmed that the Japanese government has finally rid itself of floppy disks.

"We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!" digital minister Taro Kono told Reuters on Wednesday.

Kono pledged in 2022 to eliminate law requiring floppy disks and CD-ROMs when sending data to the Japanese government. However, the decommissioning of the relic took another year and a half to be announced.

As of a few weeks ago, Japan's Digital Agency had removed 1,034 regulations that governed their use, leaving only one that was related to vehicle recycling.

Although it may seem futuristic in some respects, Japan still has a penchant for old tech, and not just floppy disks. Items like cash payments and fax machines complicate its reputation as well as its desires to lead in the tech sphere.

[...] Kono declaring victory over the retro squares comes as rumors swirl that he fancies himself the next president, who will be starting in September after the country's leadership election.

[...] A YouGov study conducted in 2018 when Kono was Foreign Minister found that two-thirds of British children aged six to 18 didn't even know what a floppy disk is.

A video filmed around that time shows children speculating that they might be from outer space, or perhaps a Victorian artifact.


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Saturday October 26, @10:15PM (12 children)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Saturday October 26, @10:15PM (#1378855)

    Hmm, by 1998 everyone was using 3.5" drives, not 5.25". Does that mean the system was out of date even when they started using it?

    If it is an IBM PC compatible DOS based system, then there are plenty of alternatives and upgraded paths for floppy drives. But why would anyone not want a genuine floppy drive? Buy one, better yet, buy a dozen!

    I'm sure they are just bitching about floppy drives when the real issue is probably some non-replaceable proprietary ISA card that interfaces with everything.

    For longevity, the IBM PC architecture was a good bet back then and for those that took that bet, it paid off. Lets see if some new cloud-AI-smartphone-whateverbullshit solution actually lasts 25 years.

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by aafcac on Saturday October 26, @10:38PM

      by aafcac (17646) on Saturday October 26, @10:38PM (#1378858)

      I was wondering about that. IIRC, the first computer my parents bought didn't even have a spot for a 5.25" drive and while most of the software we bought did come with 5.25" disks initially, later on you had to send away if you wanted them.

      If it's literally just the floppy drives, that can be a few hundred dollars a drive to replace depending on the specifics to move from floppy drives to floppy emulators, but if the hardware is that old, that would be a bandaid to the actual longer term problem.

    • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday October 26, @11:00PM (6 children)

      by Unixnut (5779) on Saturday October 26, @11:00PM (#1378861)

      Hmm, by 1998 everyone was using 3.5" drives, not 5.25". Does that mean the system was out of date even when they started using it?

      That is the date the system was installed. Depending on the complexity and custom work required the initial design of the system may well have started 10-15 years earlier, and usually things like choice of technology to build on is decided at the initial design phase.

      Generally when you are designing a big expensive system, you want to make use of existing technology that has been proven reliable instead of newer technology that has not yet proven itself over time.

      As such there may be a couple of reasons to use the 5.25" floppies over the newer 3.5" (stiffies as we used to humorously call them, as they were not flexible like the previous "floppies").

      Still I am impressed they could still find the drives and disks to keep the system running. My dad kept a 5.25" drive in the attic just in case there was ever a need to read from some old media, and even that was disposed of sometime in the late 90s as it was never actually used in the end. To think they are still relying on the technology in 2024 is quite something.

      I mean, if they are using 5.25" drives, it means they need a motherboard with a FDC that supports such a drive, and quite frankly I think the last motherboard BIOSes that supported such drives were in the early 2000's, 20+ years ago now. They must be running on some ancient HW, which is impressive that they kept it going this long. I'm thinking AT power supplies, ISA cards and 32MB of RAM max.

      Still, proves the system was well designed originally and has proven reliable. Even TFA admits the system still works fine, but they want to replace it because they are just worried about something breaking at an inopportune moment (specially the cables it seems).

      Not sure about the programming expertise issue though. Unless it is written in something really obscure, chances are it was written in ANSI C (aka C89) which is something any half decent C programmer can maintain even to this day.

      I guess running virtual machines with floppy images would not work for them. Perhaps they have some custom ISA cards that they interface with?

      Still, the system has done well, and their ETA of 2033 implies that they have begin the initial design phase now and are picking the technology that will run the future system (by which time its installed will also be considered dated), hopefully their new system proves as reliable as the one it replaces.

      • (Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday October 26, @11:49PM (5 children)

        by aafcac (17646) on Saturday October 26, @11:49PM (#1378875)

        From what I can tell, there's no particular reason that they had to stick with 5.25" floppies, the floppies are being used to load a DOS program. So, swapping a 3.5" floppy for the 5.25" one shouldn't have been any sort of a problem at the time. Depending upon the density of the disks involved it could be anywhere from 1 to 3 3.5" floppies to replace the 5.25" floppies.

        • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Sunday October 27, @02:30AM (1 child)

          by Freeman (732) on Sunday October 27, @02:30AM (#1378893) Journal

          I thought all 3.5" floppy disks held more than all 5.25" disks. Apparently I'm missing something?

          --
          Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Sunday October 27, @03:22AM

            by Reziac (2489) on Sunday October 27, @03:22AM (#1378901) Homepage

            3.5" came in 720k and 1.44mb
            5.25" came in 320k, 360k, and 1.2mb

            If you started with decent disks (eg. Sony, or repurposed AOL disks) 1.44mb and especially 360k were very reliable, the other sizes not so much.

            And there were some oddball sizes as you go back in time, but those ended up being standard.

            I have several boxfuls of the durn things, and the drives to read 'em. The onboard connectors were still a thing up through about 2010, sometimes later (you can still get specialty mainboards with 'em).

            Helpful hint: it's not the floppy drive that's so damned slow, it's the FDD interface. USB-connected floppy drive reads and writes about 4x faster than mainboard-connected,

            --
            And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
        • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday October 27, @08:45AM (2 children)

          by Unixnut (5779) on Sunday October 27, @08:45AM (#1378917)

          Are you sure? My memory may be a bit rusty but not only were the floppy connectors different (5.25" used PCB slot connectors while 3.5" used IDC connectors) but there were differences in modulation as well as servo and motor control. So not all FDC controllers could drive both types of floppy drives even if you could get the cables to fit. The post 2000 motherboards supported 3.5" but I can't think of a single one that supported 5.25".

          Possibly there was some period in the late 90s and early 2000s when motherboard FDCs could drive both types, but I doubt those were produced much longer after the 00's. I mean at the time Apple was already ringing the death-knell for the floppy as a whole by not including a floppy drive in their iMacs at all and USB was going to be "the future".

          • (Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday October 27, @02:06PM

            by aafcac (17646) on Sunday October 27, @02:06PM (#1378950)

            It's been a while and the 5.25" drives were slightly before my time, but everything that I'm seeing suggests that they could use the same cabling, just with a different actual physical connector. Were those not supported, or were they "not supported"? By the late '90s, there were hardly any products that still came with 5.25" floppies and floppies had a tendency to deteriorate over the years. Because it wouldn't be the board that made the difference, that sounds like more of a driver issue. And with an install this important, they could just have a driver written if it was that big of a deal, and depending on the chipset, one probably already existed.

          • (Score: 3, Informative) by SomeGuy on Sunday October 27, @02:39PM

            by SomeGuy (5632) on Sunday October 27, @02:39PM (#1378956)

            It was easy enough to switch out the cable with one that had the connectors you happened to need.

            On PC/XT and some early AT systems you would need to swap out the floppy controller card with one that supported high density and had its own BIOS when adding a 3.5" 1.44mb drive.

            The main headaches were some oddball clones as well as the IBM PS/2 that used non-standard wiring, non-upgradeable floppy disk controllers built in to the motherboard, and/or cases that would only physically fit drives from that vendor.

            Yes, around 2000 or so, some vendors started removing the option to select 360k/720k/1.2mb drives from their BIOS as well as supporting only one floppy drive. That was absolutely ridiculous as the hardware support was ALWAYS still present in the I/O chipsets.

            I have several of the last consumer-product motherboards to still have floppy disk controllers including a ASRock 880GM-LE and Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 from, I think, 2013. If I recall correctly, those would still let me select 360k.

            Anyway, looking closer at the article, the real issue here is that these devices used by San Fransisco implement a custom short-range wireless communications system to exchange information with moving subway trains. That is not something any current commodity hardware/software can just do, so it will all have to be re-implemented.

    • (Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday October 26, @11:04PM (1 child)

      by looorg (578) on Saturday October 26, @11:04PM (#1378864)

      I was wondering that to. Isn't it kind of weird that they went with 5.25" floppies in 1998. Was not the 3.5" the standard at that time?

      How much is a 5.25" these days anyway? Even if they are like a dollar or two each that is a lot of floppies. They are not made any more but there is stock around.

      How about just replacing the drive with some floppy-2-usb GOTEK drive or emulator? It is probably more complex using weird non-standard parts.

      $212 millions seems somewhat insane. Even tho it includes a bit more then a few boxes of floppies, at least I hope so.

      The system still works fine, but the risk of floppy disk data degradation and challenges in maintaining expertise in 1990s programming languages have further encouraged the SFMTA to seek upgrades...

      What languages?

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by cmdrklarg on Monday October 28, @08:58PM

        by cmdrklarg (5048) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 28, @08:58PM (#1379136)

        $212 millions seems somewhat insane.

        The article say they're doing a LOT more than just deprecating floppies. It's replacing the entire control system.

        --
        The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Username on Sunday October 27, @01:18AM (1 child)

      by Username (4557) on Sunday October 27, @01:18AM (#1378884)

      I don't think there was a technical reason for not replacing floppies.

      I think the real issue is that a union member wouldn't get paid to put the floppies in and out every day. Having a guy go on YouTube saying you eliminated his job and he's part of local6545785, you'll never win another election in san Francisco again.

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 27, @01:48AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 27, @01:48AM (#1378890)

        Besides the taxpayer is paying for it.

        There are legal remedies in place for anyone who disagrees. Only option is to sell everything subject to California tax and move to another state.

        We are having a similar deal here where the previous administration pleased the unions but committed the city to unsustainable finances. Now they want us to vote in a 50% city sales tax hike to back the commitments.

        I feel it's high time a lot of city functionaries get the same treatment all those employees of the businesses that had to leave California got.

        It's my strong belief that those who have been trained to simply assess their largess from the public be shown just how hard it is to EARN a dollar.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by KritonK on Sunday October 27, @08:57AM (7 children)

    by KritonK (465) on Sunday October 27, @08:57AM (#1378919)

    Meanwhile, while they're trying to move away from floppies, yesterday I replaced my PC's power suply, and I was surprised to see that it didn't have a floppy disk power connector. The rest of the world has moved away from floppies so long ago, that floppy drive power connectors are no longer required, even on a just-in-case basis. (Never the less, since I do have a 3.5" drive, I used a cable from the old power supply, to power it. Just in case.)

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Sunday October 27, @01:33PM

      by SomeGuy (5632) on Sunday October 27, @01:33PM (#1378942)

      I've also noticed recent power supplies sometimes omit the 4-pin "berg" floppy connector used by 3.5" drives, zip drives, and other 3.5" devices. Or in my case, I often need more than one.

      You might also notice that even if your power supply includes 4-pin "molex" connectors used by IDE and 5.25" drives, they don't make a connection worth a damn any more. That means 4-pin "molex" to "berg" adapter cables may not be reliable (those were actually commonly used for upgrading XT computers to 3.5" drives, as XT power supplies only had 4-pin "molex")

      So a little tip for anyone that has this problem, with a little searching one can find SATA power (these have a male connector) to 4-pin "burg" floppy adapter cables, that so far I have found to be very reliable.

    • (Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday October 27, @02:09PM (5 children)

      by aafcac (17646) on Sunday October 27, @02:09PM (#1378951)

      The vast majority of people that are using 3.5" disks these days are using USB ones anyways as many modern cases don't even have an accessible slot for a 3.5" drive, so having a power connector would be pointless as you'd still have to cut a hole in the case to swap disks.

      • (Score: 3, Touché) by KritonK on Monday October 28, @05:24AM (4 children)

        by KritonK (465) on Monday October 28, @05:24AM (#1379043)

        What's worse, many cases don't have any accessible slots, e.g., for optical media.

        When my aging PC needs replacement, I'm probably going to keep the case, just for this. This means that I will be keeping the floppy drive as well, to act as a slot cover.

        • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 28, @02:02PM (1 child)

          by Freeman (732) on Monday October 28, @02:02PM (#1379075) Journal

          There are various useful things that can fit in a 3.5" drive bay. Not just 'ye olde 3.5" Floppy Drive. Though, even those are going the way of the dodo as the main reason for a 3.5" bay was for a 3.5" floppy drive. Also, a USB external 3.5" Floppy Drive is probably better for the "occasional use" than a likely even older internal Floppy Drive.

          --
          Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Monday October 28, @04:49PM

            by aafcac (17646) on Monday October 28, @04:49PM (#1379089)

            Decades back I had one of those wonderful LS120 drives that could read 3.5" floppies and their proprietary 120mb disks. It's a shame that it was released when it was, because it was a pretty good format, had it been released a couple years earlier, it would have done very well. Unlike Zip disks where basically every one I got was defective, I never had a super disk go bad.

        • (Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday October 28, @04:43PM (1 child)

          by aafcac (17646) on Monday October 28, @04:43PM (#1379088)

          If they're going to swap just the disk drive out, they'd swap in something like compact flash. I had a CF based camera that I bought in 2000 and because the storage format has it's controller built into the card, I was able to keep swapping in larger and larger cards until I hit the filesystem limit. I could put some insane thousands of pictures on a single card the last time I tried.

          Also, for formats like microSD, there are extensions you can get to make them more accessible. My 3/4 scale arcade has one so that I can more easily plug cards in without disassembling it.

          • (Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday October 29, @05:05AM

            by KritonK (465) on Tuesday October 29, @05:05AM (#1379193)

            I used to have one of those, too. I got it second hand with a 64M compact flash card, and according to the manufacturer, it could take up to a whopping 96M. However, tt had no trouble using a 2G card, although access to it was painfully slow, so I stuck with the 64M card.

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