this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 30 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (18 children)

Turns out that in 1998, SFMTA had the latest cutting edge technology when they installed their automatic train control system.

"We were the first agency in the U.S. to adopt this particular technology but it was from an era that computers didn't have a hard drive

Aaaand that's when I stopped reading. Please, we had hard-drives in average office systems for more than a decade at that point.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

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.

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