Seattle's University Bridge still operates on Compaq 8080 and 5.25" Floppy disks
seattlebikeblog.com
seattlebikeblog.com
It also includes a picture of the computer: http://i.imgur.com/oK0eknm.jpg
http://deskthority.net/ http://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/wiki/buying_guid...
But to each his own, I think i'm just used to laptop style keyboard travel.
Where Compaq had it all over IBM was its video boards. IBM gave you a choice of two video boards: CGA and MDA. CGA gave you color and graphics, but at the expense of high quality text. With MDA, you sacrificed the graphics but the characters in text mode were rendered with a 9x14 bitmap rather than an 8x8 bitmap. This resulted in a huge quality improvement. What Compaq did was develop a video board/monitor combination that supported the higher resolution rendering in text mode, but still supported CGA quality graphics. It was a nice compromise for the time.
(The other compromise board was the 'Hercules' board. These boards connected to an IBM MDA monitor, but had a special high resolution graphics mode. They had high quality text, and better high-resolution graphics than CGA, but they weren't as widely supported.)
That bridge was built at the turn of the century. I'm surprised to hear there's a computer involved at all.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Float scroll down to bridges section
[2] http://www.wirralglobe.co.uk/news/10988354.Wirral_bridge_to_... To enjoy the full flavour of our local politics, you need to read the comment on this article. The one written in block capitals (purple font colour isn't possible on the Wallasey Globe commenting system)
Given the presence of the guys and the booths, the age of the bridges and the generally conservative nature of civil engineering, I'm pretty surprised that there's any computer involved in the process at all, let alone one from the early days of personal computers.
Part of the reason for keeping these old systems is the risk in upgrading. The software has been in service for years so it's relatively battle-tested. New software comes with the risk of bugs and deployment problems. Bugs and deployment problems can mean lengthy shutdowns of critical infrastructure (if it proves impossible to bring the old system back into service as an emergency measure).
So there is some wisdom in letting the old systems clunk along. Up to a point, that is.
For about 15 minutes, the bridge would open, almost close but then stop with one side about 2 feet up.
I was NOT looking forward to riding around to another bridge.
Another cyclist rode up, watched one of these cycles, and then he looked over at me and shrugged, rode up and did the ~2ft drop w/o incident.
I gave it about 30 seconds, looked around for cops and then went over myself. It was one of the scariest things I have done, and I was just hyper-aware for the rest of the ride home and woke up my housemates to tell them this story.
And the University Bridge (or maybe it's Montlake) needs to get hosed down with water every hour on hot days, or otherwise it will expand and be unable to lift.
Welcome to Seattle.
> The old-school electric resistors and other parts are wearing out, so that replacements must be scavenged from city shops or eBay, he says. Finnick recalls a 12-hour stoppage, when the city used a backup diesel motor to lift the bridge for boats. Other times, the city dispatched a second bridge tender to help open the bridge manually.
It does break and replacement parts are hard to find.
Everyone, but the US is paying mobile. US are still using magnetic strip credit cards. It wasn't that painful in Europe.
It was barely used anymore before
It's a fucking bridge. The only thing the system operating it is connected to is the. Fucking. Bridge. Software works? Check. Software doesn't have to be compatible with anything? Check.
These are systems where feature creep is actually actively avoided. The amount of testing and deployment effort that goes into them is so large that changes are made to them only if there really is a pressing, existing need.
Now, gaius, why do you need to use a 5.25 inch floppy disc drive instead of a more recent storage medium?
If the answer is something along the lines of 'because that is all the old computer can use' can you clarify if this is a retro hobby or an actual use case?
Come the infocalypse, everyone will work this way.
Before that an Apple II and 5.25 inch disc drive used to control the temperature of a cryostat and log data.
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).
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.
Please tell me it's not a desktop computer again, with rotating disks, fans and all those lovely things that, you know, fail constantly.
If you think that's old, you should see what our transportation infrastructure (stop lights, loop detectors, etc.) run on.