[strangattractor]

LOL:) this story seems to resurface every couple of years. My favorite part of the article:

"Jeffrey Tumlin: "It's a question of risk. The system is currently working just fine but we know that with each increasing year risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure."

This seems to imply they have been using the exact same disk for the past 20 years (absurd), they have absolutely no idea what is written on the disk and how it can be safely backed up or restored. This would be a problem regardless of the medium used.

Although I hold the line at using paper tape there is nothing wrong with using floppies other than it seems antiquated. It certainly is reliable and cheap. Maybe the only thing that needs replacing is the people running the Muni.

[nneonneo]

Every sizable manufacturer of floppy disks has exited the market. There are no more (major) suppliers for the tech. They’ve likely been depending on a dwindling supply of functional disks; if at some point they find themselves without enough working disks to operate the system, they will indeed be screwed.

There’s also the chance that they take a disk that’s on the verge of failure, plug it into the system, and some corrupted commands get loaded into the system. That could easily result in a “catastrophic failure”.

Floppy disks are not reliable or cheap. They physically degrade over time, and at this point are nowhere near cheap for “new” disks.

[asveikau]

You make a good point. However, even with the disks backed up to a better storage medium, detecting data loss on the floppy and getting a replacement written and deployed to the correct location might take a while. During that time the system may face unacceptable transit delays.

[jcgrillo]

Wait, what? If this thing boots from a floppy, and that floppy has a checksum on it, and the boot sequence involves loading the checksum and the rest of the floppy contents into RAM and computing the checksum, corruption detection would be near instantaneous and the remediation would be as quick as it takes to eject the corrupted floppy, grab another floppy copy from the bin, plug it in, and flip the on switch. So the delay would be (roughly) zero.

[asveikau]

Let's say it's not just booting from it, but constantly reading.

Let's say no one implemented the checksum. Edit: I forgot that floppies have a crc check, my bad.

Let's say the machine that can write the new disk is physically far away from the machines that read them. (Or the guy with a stack of new disks -- which are harder to find every year -- his office is some distance from the control machine).

[jcgrillo]

I guess I assumed it was only reading from the floppy, not also writing to it.. that doesn't seem like it would last very long at all without encountering errors (at least based on my memories of reusing floppies until they were completely worn out)