Boeing 747s still get critical updates via floppy disks

steelbrain 5 years ago |

I am confused, is this piece making fun of Floppy disks or just documenting a fact?

If it's the former, I'd discourage the criticism because Floppy disks are working, and there's no good reason to redo the whole thing and potentially create a lot of bugs, that you'll then spend a wormhole amount of money fixing.

Change for the sake of change is a bad idea. Especially for equipment that has to be ultra-reliable.

hedberg10 5 years ago | |

Neurotic journalists who don't build anything ever, much less sell it.

"OMG, this still runs on COBOL? haha"

Yes.

londons_explore 5 years ago | |

> Floppy disks are working

But are they? How many hours have very expensive machines been grounded because the disk drive got misaligned and said "Disk Read error in drive A:. Abort, Retry, Fail?"

anfilt 5 years ago | |

My thoughts.

d_silin 5 years ago |

FYI the 28-day update is this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautical_Information_Publi...

HDMI_Cable 5 years ago |

Floppy Disks seem like a type of security practice. Nobody can install ransomware (or anything else) on your plane if the devices are barely even manufactured anymore.

jraph 5 years ago |

Haven't floppy disks stopped being manufactured? How is this handled?

bierjunge 5 years ago | |

A lot of organizations bought everything they could get a few years ago (especially airlines and U.S. military were buying like crazy and paying incredible prices). Now they have basically tons of floppy's stuffed in some warehouses around the world and it should last for a decade or even longer. This should be enough time to get a different medium chosen and certified.

3v1n0 5 years ago | | |

Mhm sure, but they don't lose memory abilities over time? How this could be considered ok when used for security related things?

fzzzy 5 years ago | | |

I have floppies from 1983 that still work fine.

zaarn 5 years ago | | |

They loose data over time. If you reformat them, they are fine accepting new data.

m463 5 years ago |

although they talk about the 747-400, it's notable that the 747 came out in 1968.

atat7024 5 years ago |

Worst of all worlds!