SFMTA's train system in San Francisco is not only relying on humans to run it, but turns out that a floppy disk has been playing a key role for decades.
Sure computers had a hard drive, but it was the style at the time to remove them and use them as lifts in our shoes. You could tell who the poors were because they walked with a limp on account of only having one computer.
I’m trying to justify that in my head, but the only idea that I have is that “old” hard drives couldn’t handle the vibrations of a train. But flash existed even back then, and floppies aren’t exactly known for their high capacity.
Flash (NOVRAM or EEPROM as it was called at the time) did exit, but it was expensive, tiny capacity, and had astonishingly few write operations (compared to today) before it couldn’t be written to again. Some of the early stuff could be written (reprogrammed) as few as 1000 times and only had capacity of about 20KB.
An interesting thought, that the author of that article is younger than me, possibly like 5+ years younger. And I’m only a bit under 28. Scary how it ticks.
First several generations of hard drives really were awful and broke if you stared at them at them wrong. Floppies were more reliable, cheaper, and easy to get.
By 1998? No, hard drives were standard and reasonably reliable by then. Floppies were headed towards the end of their lifecycle with a high failure rate due to cutting costs.
I’m not sure what time you talk about, but it must be before 5,25" 20MB MFM drives and 30 MB RLL. Which were way more reliable than floppy disks and diskettes. These drives were available in the mid 80’s.
Maybe they meant home computers, and that’s all most of their audience will picture in their heads, anyway. But yeah, not a very good computer historian.
Aaaand that’s when I stopped reading. Please, we had hard-drives in average office systems for more than a decade at that point.
Sure computers had a hard drive, but it was the style at the time to remove them and use them as lifts in our shoes. You could tell who the poors were because they walked with a limp on account of only having one computer.
This comment has major Grampa Simpson vibes and I love it.
… we wore an onion on our hips, as was the fashion at the time…
I’m trying to justify that in my head, but the only idea that I have is that “old” hard drives couldn’t handle the vibrations of a train. But flash existed even back then, and floppies aren’t exactly known for their high capacity.
Flash (NOVRAM or EEPROM as it was called at the time) did exit, but it was expensive, tiny capacity, and had astonishingly few write operations (compared to today) before it couldn’t be written to again. Some of the early stuff could be written (reprogrammed) as few as 1000 times and only had capacity of about 20KB.
Yeah they’re over a decade off from computers that didn’t come equipped with one by default.
Haha, that was literally the exact same point I stopped reading. I have emails older than this system and they weren’t stored on floppys 😂
An interesting thought, that the author of that article is younger than me, possibly like 5+ years younger. And I’m only a bit under 28. Scary how it ticks.
First several generations of hard drives really were awful and broke if you stared at them at them wrong. Floppies were more reliable, cheaper, and easy to get.
By 1998? No, hard drives were standard and reasonably reliable by then. Floppies were headed towards the end of their lifecycle with a high failure rate due to cutting costs.
I’m not sure what time you talk about, but it must be before 5,25" 20MB MFM drives and 30 MB RLL. Which were way more reliable than floppy disks and diskettes. These drives were available in the mid 80’s.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/x98scz/the_original_20mb_mfm_hdd_died_in_my_286_recently/
Maybe you are mistaking a few bad blocks that were allocated out in the allocation table, for being unreliable?
Maybe they meant home computers, and that’s all most of their audience will picture in their heads, anyway. But yeah, not a very good computer historian.
Home computers had hard drives by then. This was after Win95 was out.