[VyseofArcadia]

> "It's like if you lose your memory overnight, and every morning, somebody has to tell you hey 'this is who you are and what your purpose is what you have to do today,'" said Maguire.

Yeah, that's called a cold boot. Moving to not-floppies doesn't mean you can avoid this. Clearly it's off of floppies instead of ROM so you can more easily update the software, but I am wondering how often that ended up happening. Maybe EEPROMs would have been better.

> Luz Pena: "How dire is it to change the system to upgrade it from a floppy disk to a wireless system?"

I agree that floppies aren't the peak of reliability, but "a wireless system" also sounds like a disaster. I don't want critical urban infrastructure running on extremely hackable OTA updates. For the love of god, SF, you can avoid pretty much all potential cybersecurity problems by just not putting your trains online.

I feel like neither the interviewer nor the interviewee really had the technical expertise to speak to this. This entire piece is just, "oooooo, floppies are old. Old bad! Why not new yet? New good."

[JTbane]

Couldn't the city set up a private WAN for the trains, avoiding the security issues of being connected to the internet?

[VyseofArcadia]

That doesn't avoid security issues inherent in wireless, but at least you have to be somewhat near the train instead of the other side of the planet.