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?
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?
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.
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.
Anyway, two years later I got a brand-new laptop with good hardware that was running 98se. As far as I remember, it didn't crash during normal usage. By then I was studying computer science, and would sometimes write or run programs that would make it crash, but that was on me. I did dual boot in Linux, and that didn't have any problems on that machine either.
Fun fact, I still have that laptop, it's over 25 years old now, but it still works and runs Windows 98se!
Hell, it most of the time worked on some combo of the cheapest parts - modern systems wont even get to UEFI boot part on the parts of the same quality.
> If you think that's 9x was stable and reliable, you may be thinking very nostalgicly.
I'm sure ATC systems were properly tested, including the drivers. Don't compare that with cheap consumer PCs that we had.
ATC systems are definitely not going to have users installing random software at any time.
I've seen enough stories of power outages permanently damaging SSDs, that if you have bad power from your utilities provider and can't get them to fix it, then I recommend investing in a UPS.
As the article points out: the hardware is at risk of physically failing and it’s getting harder to replace like for like. That’s the reason for looking at an upgrade. Hell, even turning the machines off to replace them is a challenge since some systems need to run 24/7!
The most recent Dolphin Emulator post referenced a bug they had where memory cards were written to too quickly under the emulator (and even on actual hardware if you had memory cards that were sufficiently fast) which caused some games problems because they did not expect save files to be written so quickly. Imagine things like that, but where the worst case isn't having Wind Waker hang while saving, but planes crashing.
Anyway, a long time ago, in a physic lab class, we had a custom spectrometer device that was controlled using the printer port. (Probably a light, a detector, a diffraction grid and a steppers motor, and perhaps some weird card as an interface to the computer.) It was controlled by a custom Pascal program in the DOS command line.
It was connected to a Win 95 computer that died and we had to replace it with a Win 2000 one. The problem is that anyone can read/write the printer port in Win 95 but that's not possible in Win 2000. [1] We had to make some magic, probably rewrite the program and use some weird device driver to write to the printer port (IIRC again). And multitasking messed the timing. At the end it worked, but upgrading the computer was not easy.
[1] If that makes no sense, replace that with a Win 3.1 to Win 95 transition, but I think it was not that old.
When the pysical computer gave out, I replaced it with a reasonably new one but instead of using a modern OS I installed MS-DOS in order to get it up and running as reliably and quickly as possible.
If I were doing the same today, I'd likely get a new computer and install FreeDOS.
Of course, nothing can prevent poorly designed code and hardware.
Emulation is likely possible, probably for many of the systems involved, but this is not a field where bugs, especially ones introduced due to emulation, would be easily acceptable.
> Of course, nothing can prevent poorly designed code and hardware.
Agreed, but the reality is that here, trying to fix things and ending up breaking them can and probably will kill people.
Being terrified of progress means you're likely to kill far more people.
I'm not really sure what you're arguing for, or against, here. Nobody denies that changes are needed. The hardware is failing and buying new isn't possible to do seamlessly because of the age of the software.
The discussion is whether emulation is a possibility and people are pointing out that this comes with its own risks, so the discussion should centre around whether the cost/risk of emulation is lower than the cost/risk of building completely new systems.
I am only aware of a single modern-ish motherboard with ISA, the MS-98A9, and it only supports Intel 3rd Gen Core series CPUs.
That said, if it was a large enough project, reverse engineering and re-implementing using modern components would likely be feasible. Turning each of these into network services handled by something more akin to a RaspberryPi could modernize the data sources while providing a sustainable and modular replacement strategy. The problem is that its not "sexy" enough to get a major government project, and it would not grease the correct palms that a multi-billion dollar next-gen complex proprietary replacement would.
For example, I've looked into emulating DOS, because I don't like the existing emulators. But I don't need to emulate floppy disk drives, or their drivers, or their hardware cards. I just write some software that can fake a disk drive and hook it to the I/O interrupts. That would be a simple project.
There's nothing sophisticated about DOS.
In hindsight, I'm baffled that it took many many years for people to develop clones of DOS.
For example, EDLIN. A trivial program. I'd write it in a high level language like D, get it to work, then hand-translate it to asm. The executable loader is absurdly simple. And so on.
Even 8 inch floppies + drives are still available and those got abandoned a decade before 5.25” let alone 3.5” disks.
Seems the market has demand, at least in the mid-term.
2. There are floppy emulators that replicate the functionality of floppy drives with flash
3. The above two probably absorb all of the demand today, but even if they didn't, the volume is so low that fixed manufacturing costs per unit could likely push unit prices well beyond even $50. The tooling for factories often costs millions and unless you are selling in high volume, you will have quite a high fixed cost per unit.
That was cheaper at that time, than modernising that system. But it's clearly not long-term scalable.
I've heard of S/360s in KTLO mode in basements keeping banks running. Teams of people slowly crafting COBOL to get new features in at a cost of thousand of dollars a day each, and it "still works". But from a risk point of view, this is also ridiculous.
Safety critical systems have different economics. Yes, you can keep the floppy systems going, but the cost of keeping them going is rising exponentially each year, and at some point a failure will cost one or more airliners full of civilians and the blame will be put on not having a reasonable upgrade policy.
Sometimes you have to fix things before they stop working, or the cost is not just eyewateringly expensive in terms of dollars, but of human lives too.
Costs are rising heavily. IBM sold off most of that business, to people who don’t really want it as the skill base to support it is retiring and it’s too expensive to easily replace. This has been going on for a couple of decades, but it’s now gaining more and more pace.
Every year you delay is pushing that lower, and then there's whether the funding is available because you're in fairweather economic conditions or if crisis will happen concordantly with some other crisis (I.e. do you want to be stuck replacing air traffic control systems in a rush because some war has wiped out the floppy supply chain right as your air logistics is a critical issue?)
This whole thing is being done as a reaction to this video:
https://youtu.be/YeABJbvcJ_k?t=1540
The article completed skipped over this. This video was released literally a week ago and is completely mocking the FAA. Floppy disks are a big joke in this video.