This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
All the deserved ribbing aside, if you had to design a removable, R/W, high-capacity, environmentally tolerant, secure, fault-tolerant, mission critical storage system that could last 25 years, starting NOW...
What would you pick?
That's a tough one, even if you design future hardware upgrades into the system.
Sounds like an addiction
Hey man, you got any of them floppies?
Far more than I am proud to say, far more.
I've got an old USB 3.5 drive for posterity, SF. I'll light one up for you.
Who will carry on the knowledge of what the a:\ and b:\ drives were?
And why the floppy drive's ribbon cable has a little twist in it??
Now I'm curious, why *does *the floppy drives cable have a little twist in it?
It's kind of an elegant hack IBM did to make floppy drives easier to bother with.
Floppy drives were designed to attach to the computer in a bus topology, sharing all of their data connections. The only wires that weren't in common were the Motor Enable and Drive Select lines, which is how the computer would tell the drives which one it wanted to talk to. This meant the drive needed to know which drive it was, so there were jumpers on the back so you could set them up as Drive 0 or 1 (which would show up in DOS as A or B). By twisting seven cables (three of which were ground and weren't effected) and jumpering all drives as Drive 1(B), drives attached before the twist would respond as drive B and after the twist as drive A. That way you didn't need to fuck with the jumpers. Some later drives even did away with the jumpers and hard wired them as B.
Thnx for this exposition!
I'm not 100% sure off the top of my head, but the end result is that the drive is set to A: rather than B: in Windows. Something to do with the pins on the motherboard specifying the drive order.
You are correct. Later drives sometimes had a cable select dip switch/pin or different ports on the motherboard.
Right the jumpers would be cable select, master , slave generally. You could use master and slave or cs but shouldn't together. Not that you can't but screwing up your jumpers was the easy way to be pulling you hair out for failure to boot to the right drive or failure to id in the right order.
The CP/M gang, of course!
I only teach my kids about /dev/fd0
Teach your kids to play music with cat /dev/fd0 >/dev/snd.
Oh my god make it stop
Ctrl + C
Jesus, thank you. Only took 12 hours of scrambling my brain
They’d be better off not relying on the cloud.
wait till they hear from the 5.25" Floppy Disk lobby
They're not merely replacing floppies, swapping in some emulators to take over. They're attempting to redesign and future-proof the entire system. That kind of a big deal. Oh, and it all has to run flawlessly during the transition period.
This ain't your homelab boys.
According to the article, the other improvements are priced separately from the $212 million de-floppy-ing.
And that cost includes decades of support.
The $212 million contract includes support services from Hitachi for "20 to 25 years," the Chronicle said.
No, the $212 million includes the entire upgrade (and 20 years of support) of the automatic train control system. The full $700 million plus is for the overall modernization of multiple systems.
Not disputing what you said — just clarifying that other upgrades are not part of the $212 mil and what is meant by “whole system”. The $212 is just to replace the floppy based system with something newer that includes a service contract.
“Beyond the floppies, though, the Muni Metro needs many more 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. “
Supposedly the new system is five gens ahead of the old system and would have additional features. Some would say “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” but whatever. I’m sure it will be as fancy as upgrading to Windows 11 at that price.
Yeah, I understand the article to be saying that the Hitachi contract is for the train control system, including the software and equipment necessary for the operation of the train underground. The broader system upgrades include communications systems between trains and stations. At least how I read it.
This is clearly a tender fail. Byte code can be emulated for a fraction on that price. And it's a two or three man job with a rota
