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US air traffic control enters the 21st century, starts to abandon floppy disks
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2026
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The floppy disk is 60 years old. In which universe is migrating away from 60-year-old technology "moving fast and breaking stuff"?!
Fuck. You just reminded me of my age.
Yeah, me too. I can't move fast anymore, but I can certainly break stuff 🤣
Your own back and hips?
You saw me, uh?
What are they moving to? Because that's what the comment is referencing. The new tech they are moving to, not the old tech.
I know it’s a rethorical question but from what I’ve seen they updated their "information display".
In my country our equivalent is an in-house Java software running on Linux thin clients. The software basically shows meteorological information, runways status, airspace status and stuff like that, so it is connected to a network in order to receive those informations.
So I’m wondering why FAA used the floppy disks? Was it to update the information? MET is updated every 30 minutes, day and night. That’s a handful of manual updates to do…
PS: Their brand new "Enterprise Information Display System (E-IDS)” is what we do in Europe since, uhh, 30 years ?
Why do the banks use COBOL? Why does NASA use FORTRAN?
Because they didn't upgrade their systems in time while deep knowledge of these systems were intact and would have made upgrading seamlessly much easier. Now they have black boxes that no one truly understands anymore, so they're paralyzed by fear and that's what's keeping them trapped in these old systems.
No, because when infrastructure is sophisticated, critical, and expensive enough, you don't just go around replacing it.
I bring up Legacy Code for a reason. NASA (e.g., FORTRAN) is one of the few organizations in the world that can spend so many millions of dollars on code that they can virtually guarantee that it's bug free.
And as for the cobalt code in the banking industry, the entire world could shut down if things went wrong by replacing it.
Aviation use X400 and X500 which is bank SMTP.