[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)