| The reporting on this has been an atrocious, lazy, embarrassment to journalism (aka: a normal day) so I tried my best to look into it. As far as I can tell the only systems that use floppy disks are IDS-4 terminals, of which there are a couple hundred left in the US, the rest having been upgraded (to IDS-5 or similar systems) over the last 30 years. I don't know if it is small regional airports with no money, large international airports with few moments of downtime time needed for the upgrade, a mix those two, bad luck with the bureaucratic wheel-of-priorities spin, or what. But there's no context to any of these articles, only "FLOPPY DRIVES LOL" so I had to take the time to find out what systems were actually impacted. I mean, it could have been an old HP Oscilloscope in a RF rack that used floppy drives to store images and log data, or it could have been the Master Control Program of the entire air traffic control network. There's a slight difference in impact between those two. It appears as though there are multiple competitors/replacements to IDS-4 so the solution is to cut a check and block off some time on the calendar. edit: every single journalist who just grabs a couple of tweets, adds some commentary, and dusts off their hands muttering "job well done" should encased in a Lucite cube and displayed in the town square as an object of ridicule. |