San Francisco's Light Rail To Upgrade From Floppy Disks (theregister.com) 113
Those taking public transport in the tech hub of San Francisco may be reassured to know that their rides will soon no longer be dependent on floppy disks. From a report: San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's director of transportation Jeffrey Tumlin told ABC that the city's automatic light-rail control system is running on outdated tech and "relies on three five-inch floppy disks" to boot up. The reporter was holding a 3.5-inch disk in the broadcast, so may have just skipped the word "point."
"It's a question of risk," Tumlin explained in a three-minute segment about the floppy replacement project. "The system is currently working just fine, but we know that with each increasing year the risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure." The agency noted that its system was installed in 1998, when floppies were still in common use and, er, "computers didn't have hard drives."
"It's a question of risk," Tumlin explained in a three-minute segment about the floppy replacement project. "The system is currently working just fine, but we know that with each increasing year the risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure." The agency noted that its system was installed in 1998, when floppies were still in common use and, er, "computers didn't have hard drives."
Likely not even using real floppy anymore (Score:5, Informative)
They likely are not even using an actual floppy disk mechanism at all, but a floppy disk emulator with high endurance flash media which are readily available and far more reliable. But the underlying system it is plugged into would be of more concern. The boot media is likely just a good sound bite.
I have used these devices a bunch on industrial CNC machines where these are common issues. Floppy emulators, Serial port to ethernet port servers, and IDE to PCMCIA adapters to the rescue. The core of the machine is likely going to last decades beyond the computer hardware and a new replacement in the fractions of a million each means they will keep them running with the old controllers as long as possible.
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Yeah replace that 1998 computer with a newer one that supports hard drives since hard drives weren't available in 1998. What a bunch of non-sense, I bought my first hard drive in ~1985.
From TFS:
The agency noted that its system was installed in 1998, when floppies were still in common use and, er, "computers didn't have hard drives."
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I was talking about industrial PCs. They were often older-spec, very expensive, rugged computers to be used as controllers in machines. So even if these are industrial PCs, they were already old-fashioned when they were implemented.
I think you will find that upgrading and modernizing the systems in aircraft is quite normal. Why should it be different in a light rail or CNC machine?
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Also no government agency that might decide it's a human safety issue and force a release of specifications.
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Re:Likely not even using real floppy anymore (Score:4, Informative)
totally depends what hardware is in it. if it has a bunch of custom made unobtanium ISA or PCI cards like almost all industrial machines then no, cause you are looking at replacing the entire control system
its often not as simple as buying a dell and calling it a day
Captain Crunch (Score:2)
What are the odds that this has nothing to do with hardware or software but is just a licensing issue ?
That and the system can be hacked by a phreaker with a blue box
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I'm sure you know about emulators. You're even emulating an old font ;-)
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They could make copies of the disks too, even if they are copy protected.
The Greaseweazle is a cheap open source device for doing this, and there are others on the market. It uses high resolution timers to read/write when the flux transitions happen on the disk, and can thus make perfect copies of any disk, regardless of format.
Copy protection for floppies often worked by having "weak" bits, where the flux transition was in the middle of where a bit was supposed to be read. Due to slight variations in the s
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Availability is OK for now, but it's a good time to make a plan for upgrading. That new-old stock will degrade at some point even if it's never sold. Especially since it will (for a while) be seen as low value or even a white elephant.
At some point as viable stock goes down, a few will snap up the rest of the supply and mark it up 10,000% because anyone trying to buy obviously has no options.
Kinda like in the mid to late '90s when you would see ISA MFM HD controllers going for $500 or $1000 even though they
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I've used those to replace the floppy drives on an Atari 1040STFM, Roland W30 sampler and a Kawai Q80 MIDI sequencer. They work a treat !
If they're not already using them this should be the first thing they look at.
Re: Likely not even using real floppy anymore (Score:2)
While my Roland workstation keyboard uses pc-compatible floppies, I learned that old Akai S-series samplers floppy drives weren't PC-compatible, but rather they were compatible with Amiga 600/1200. Had something to do with twisted wires. Took me long to find a replacement drive. Luckily I had a bunch in my museum, so eventually found a unit that worked.
On top of that, Akai doesn't use DOS format floppies either, they write to disk differently. Luckily there's an easy piece of software that does that.
Just to
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The first hard disk I met for a microcomputer was a 5meg drive for the apple ][.
It presented itself to the computer as 35 or so 143k floppies on the same controller card, so it could use the regular DOS at the time. (there might have been a patch, but I don't think so).
And, iirc, the drive was an 8" drive.
That was 1981; the following year, I had a 10meg drive assigned to me for development on an Osborne. It appeared as a single CP/M drive!
[but you could specify about 14 "users" on CP/M, and only see those
Re: Likely not even using real floppy anymore (Score:2)
There are not emulators for everything. I just donated a lot of Bernoulli drives to a local museum and there are tons of floppy formats that are somewhere in between technologies, specific to device or manufacturer (eg Sony), have different or even programmable controllers etc.
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No idea what you wrote due to idiotic font choice.
Specsavers!
Specification of 'bloat' (Score:4)
I have a hard time believing the system would be any more reliable once replaced by a modern version taking many GB's.
Oh yes HD's were absolutely available in 1998...
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A tiny SSD of a few GB would be extremely reliable. Maybe run Linux for security with a DOS emulator...
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Oh yes HD's were absolutely available in 1998...
In 1988 I bought my first hard disk. It was 20 megabytes, and I never came close to filling it despite many, many 2d CAD drawings, (DFI iDraw. A small business' worth! I hope DFI still exists).
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I think he meant 1988
They're moving on up... (Score:3)
...to Zip drives!
Really? Or Really dumb? (Score:3)
From the end of this article's text we have this gem: The agency noted that its system was installed in 1998, when floppies were still in common use and, er, "computers didn't have hard drives."
Well, my CP/M 2.0 system in about 1980 had a Morrow Designs Disk Jockey (no rev yet) controller and two 19 megabyte hard disks. And I was a normal moral RF engineer at the time at Rockwell International. Computers sure as hell had hard drives well before 1998. You just had to put it in and code the BIOS yourself. Typical news media level intelligence is seen in that quote above. Um, the agency official was also "ignernt."
{^_-}
1998 when "computers didn't have hard drives." (Score:2)
My dad bought an 8086 in 1988 or so that had a 20MB HDD. How old is this guy?
good dads think alike (Score:1)
Solid engineering looks like this (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, the hardware is outdated, but since it works it would be foolish to replace the system.
As to the floppy drives and disk, they could get one of these: https://www.cf2scsi.com/produc... [cf2scsi.com] and later they could go to an emulation. They are not the only ones with well-working software on legacy hardware.
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Yup - solid engineering. But engineering that needs to be replaced. This rail system provides a public service, and downtime will cost the local society a bloody mit-full. If it can't be supported, it's gotta be replaced because the cost of failure is so high. But, if there are a half-dozen spares on the shelf and they get tested from time to time, there's nothing to worry about. Boot from paper tape if that's what blows your skirt up.
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No. Some _component_ needs to be replaced. That is different.
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Sure, the hardware is outdated, but since it works it would be foolish to replace the system.
Tell us you don't know what MTTF means without telling us you don't know what MTTF means. ...
Tell us you don't know what obsolescence management risk is without telling us
Funny story, I worked with a 65 year old German at a chemical plant who was proud of the fact that his instrumentation was still pneumatic like it was the 1940s. He didn't believe in electrical instrumentation, much less modern digital bus communic
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As usual, you are without insight.
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As usual, you are without insight.
I noticed you failed to refute anything I said. Anyway I don't know anything about this. I am only a reliability engineer by trade. But sure please keep pretending the right hand side of the graph doesn't exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and that all parts are infinitely replaceable.
As usual you are average. Somehow you say clever things some of the time, while at other times (such as this one) you are a complete moron.
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As usual, you are without insight.
I noticed you failed to refute anything I said.
There is no point. You just do not know enough to even understand a refutation. Some times you get things right, but most of the time you are a Dunning-Kruger far left case.
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Sure, the hardware is outdated, but since it works it would be foolish to replace the system.
As to the floppy drives and disk, they could get one of these: https://www.cf2scsi.com/produc... [cf2scsi.com] and later they could go to an emulation. They are not the only ones with well-working software on legacy hardware.
So are you still running a computer from 1998? Assuming you had patches to keep it secure, are you sure you couldn't think of any use-cases for modern hardware and software?
I'm sure the system worked awesome at the time, and it's a ton of work to build a modern system that would work as well, but there's definitely more you could do.
Better resiliency, ie how often do things crash, and what happens if a server crashes, and are there scenarios resulting in bigger service interruptions than necessary? Also, th
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Never touch a working system, unless you absolutely have to. Basic engineering knowledge.
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Never touch a working system, unless you absolutely have to. Basic engineering knowledge.
I've built transit control systems. "Working" is a relative term.
If the current system doesn't have failover capability if the main server goes down is that "working"?
If operators can't shut down components quickly enough in certain disaster scenarios is that "working"?
If trains are stopped because the system had an unscheduled reboot is that "working"?
If it can't store a history of alarms and operator actions is that "working"?
Here's a question, are you among the people who thought the person who said: "We
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Here's a question, are you among the people who thought the person who said: "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 so you have to load the software from floppy disks on to the computer," was just an idiot who didn't known tech from the late 90s?
While I do not know, my guess is that they could not get a HDD with the certified reliability score they required. HDDs were _very_ flaky at that time. What they have in hardware is obviously not consumer-grade trash, as that would likely have failed a long time ago. Well, maybe. TEAC made really reliable 5 1/4 floppy drives and they had industrial versions that were even better. I have a regular one that still works, but no computer that can use it. The floppies are probably also some industrial grade thin
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For a system that was never designed to be online? And for a system that mandates multiple 9's or people outside of your company loose their livelihoods with politicians looking for scapegoats? Boy, you must love living dangerously.
The issue isn't that it needs modernization. The issue is that it needs more serviceable components. For a system built prior to 2000 modernization is always a downgrade. (Those systems tend to be more rep
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And half of those reasons would start and end with the word: "Internet"
For a system that was never designed to be online? And for a system that mandates multiple 9's or people outside of your company loose their livelihoods with politicians looking for scapegoats? Boy, you must love living dangerously.
I was involved with deployment of a comparable system not too long ago and everything was air gaped.
There's places looking at Internet accessibility and the cloud now, but for the control system itself I wouldn't be surprised if it was still air gaped.
The issue isn't that it needs modernization. The issue is that it needs more serviceable components. For a system built prior to 2000 modernization is always a downgrade. (Those systems tend to be more repairable than their modern replacements that require complete overhauls the second some developer decides the JS they wrote 6 months ago isn't interesting anymore.)
Do you actually have experience in the area or are you just making things up?
Attempting to replace a floppy drive is one thing, demanding a web panel so some jackass can sit on the pot while "working" is something else entirely.
No one in their right might is making the actual control system remotely accessible for obvious reasons [verdict.co.uk]. Maybe some modern systems make certain reports externally available, but no wa
How Bullshit Budgets Are Made. (Score:2)
”The system is currently working just fine, but we know that with each increasing year the risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure."
Or, you could just copy the “at risk” data to a brand new floppy and stop making lame excuses? Amazin is bragging that they sold 200+ 10-packs just last month from Maxell. Doesn’t seem to be media at risk of dying off anytime soon. First saw USB on PCs in 1997, and they still sell USB floppy drives too.
But hey, let’s not let all those $20 solutions get in the way of public transit needing 38 million dollars and 10 years to milk a budget twice that big, because that’s just ho
Re: How Bullshit Budgets Are Made. (Score:2)
No, as others have pointed out:
Get a Gotek drive emulator [gotekemulator.com]
And
A greaseweazle raw disk reader [decromancer.ca]
Between the two, there is very very very little out there that cannot be read and supported in a solid state manner.
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No, as others have pointed out:
Get a Gotek drive emulator [gotekemulator.com]
And
A greaseweazle raw disk reader [decromancer.ca]
Between the two, there is very very very little out there that cannot be read and supported in a solid state manner.
Fantastic! Now that we have identified cheap affordable solutions, we should rejoice in the fact that the upgrade contract estimate will only cost 37 million instead of 38, and only go over budget by 2x instead of 3x.
I wish I was joking, but I’m not. Watch and see.
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If by 'brand new' you mean at least a decade old then yes
Don't fix it if it isn't broken (Score:3)
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Sooner or later the disk drives will break and they won't be able to replace them and the system could be down for weeks.
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No reason to fix it if it isn't broken.
False. There's absolutely reason to fix things which aren't broken. Obsolescence management is a form of business risk management. Everything eventually wears out and breaks. While you're not overly concerned about it when it's an off the shelf current generation part, when you start talking about old obsolete equipment you are in that sweet spot of high probability of failure (wear out failure) along with a healthy dose of "oh fuck we can't fix it anymore". In the industry the technical term for this is ca
We are running out of floppies (Score:3)
when floppies were still in common use. lolol (Score:2)
Just slap (Score:3)
Hard drives (Score:3)
Modern Journalism (Score:2)
I forgot who pointed this out, but every time you hear a journalist get something incredibly wrong, keep in mind they are also covering politics, legal cases, business, education, health issues, etc...
I noticed it in the 1990s when computers became a thing, and found that most reporters barely had a rudimentary grasp on what they were or how they worked. You could make an argument that they needed some time to get up to speed on new technology, but nowadays, when you do some basic research on Google or Wiki
I'm not sure I get it... (Score:3)
If I had a floppy-dependent system I'd have wanted people evaluating commercially available floppy emulators starting 10 years ago; potentially trying to push specific developments if my system requires things that the retrocomputing guys don't(whether in terms of features or in terms of not being hand-built in small runs by hobbyists); but, barring some especially esoteric complication I'm not thinking of, slapping floppy emulators into a floppy-based system and bringing it right up to the present day in terms of media seems like it would be both a relatively simple project and much, much cheaper, lower risk, and more predictable than a full 'upgrade' that promises to rip out the old system and replace it with a full new glorious IoT something something.
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How about floppy emulators? (Score:2)
A simple and cheap upgrade would be one of the many floppy emulators available today. At least one supports 5.25 inch disks.
https://floppyusbemulator.com/... [floppyusbemulator.com]
IBM and Wang Computer... (Score:2)
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Yes, I remember those very, very, very large and expensive professional Wang word processors from the 80's. The photo below doesn't do justice, because these were mainframe clients. One didn't just own a terminal or two, one had to factor in enough space for the mainframe. And this cutting edge technology, (which paid for itself), didn't come cheap.
https://www.historyofinformati... [historyofinformation.com]
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- hardly "...large..."
OK, I claim oldness. Also, it wasn't me that worked with those things, I was an old school technical illustrator, ...but we all took breaks together outside when the roach coach arrived. I swear large tapes or such was involved. I just remember the size and amount of 'computers'.
Perhaps the source of my confusion is another facility/job, which handled 2D CAD, and those mainframes were in air-conditioned rooms. FWIW, the CAD workstations were so gawdawful I opted to remain an old school illustrator until tha
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...and 30 megabytes below fixed
Do you mean 30 Mb read-only? Whoa, if that's the case. No wonder we took up so much physical space.
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no, that meant it stayed in the unit.
the upper disk pack could be removed, so you could swap in a different pack of platters. I believe that the heads remained in the base unit, rather than being part of the pack.
Terry Childs may have a point (Score:2)
He genuinely thought the other people working at BART was incompetent, and locked them out of network admin roles.
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Woah! This did not go in the direction I thought it would. I was thinking about Terry Childs the network admin (from Hell) [wikipedia.org] and thought to provide a reference to your informative comment, not Terry Childs the serial killer [wikipedia.org] who I discovered after a simple internet search.
Floppy drive emulator and SD cards (Score:3)
This sounds like something they should be able to manage, by substituting solid state for the mechanical drive but otherwise leaving well enough alone. Floppy drive emulators (and MFM/RLL drive emulators) are a solved problem because the retro computing crowd has needed them for years. If it has an SD card slot, then updates can even be distributed the same way as before, except the medium is postage stamp sized. Use SD card slots where the whole card clicks into place and clicks out again when pressed, and it's pretty much just a miniaturized floppy drive as far as the user is concerned.
Ricky Martin (Score:2)
Ricky Martin can show them a hard disk.
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The summary doesn't even make sense. Was it "three five-inch disks" or a "3.5-inch disk". They're not the same thing (and I don't care if if the train system is using them).
Re:Why would that reassume me? (Score:4, Insightful)
You might care if you actually have to take that system for commuting or whatever, because it's getting very hard to obtain new sources of the disks, they and the hardware to read them does wear out, etc...
I'm guessing it's 1 3.5" drive rather than 3 5.25" drives, because the quarter was dropped, and the 3.5" disc used as an example.
And yes, while expensive it's best to replace/update it now rather than keep letting the technological debt pile up until you face a days/weeks/months long outage because a critical bit broke and you no longer have spares.
AOL disks don't reformat as well as they once did (Score:2)
Now if I really wanted to read a floppy on a modern machine, well, I have a USB based external floppy drive just for such an emergency. You can even boot from those.
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Spare drives are probably not a problem, more likely the old disks. I built an old DOS box recently and ancient drives in a box in the garage worked just fine. However those old AOL disks don't reformat as well as they once did. I had to dip into my stash of Borland C++ install CDs and they had quite a few failures.
You might know this already, but if not, I've had luck reviving old floppies with a heat gun. Just hold it far enough away that you don't melt anything, and get it nice and warm to the touch.
I guess that's kind of like how we used to blow on malfunctioning video game cartridges.
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Re:Why would that reassume me? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, they can just get one of the numerous FDD hardware emulators. This is not rocket science.
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Indeed. As soon as you do things like formats outside of spec or continue reading while switching tracks (as some copy-protection does), they probably stop working, but this is not the case in the story at hand.
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I wouldn't count on the disks not using "copy protection", as hardware makers could be asses like that.
That said, if it was a common "copy protection" technique, I can easily see the industrial controller replacements being able to do it. After all, there's a very good chance the original manufacturer is no longer supporting the equipment, assuming they're not bankrupt, bought out, with the copyright effectively lost in the shuffle.
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Well, if there is copy protection, you just need to look whether the emulator can do it. But this is an industrial control system, not a computer game.
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Remember "hardware makers could be asses like that"?
Sure, it's an industrial control system, not a computer game. What does that have to do with having copy protection or not?
I've read a number of articles about companies using copy control systems that no gamer would accept. Like requiring a dongle attached to your parallel port (you don't need to print, right?).
Re:Why would that reassume me? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope. These go to the Shuggart bus and are a complete, electrically and logically compatible replacement. They are used, for example, in older CNC machines and the like where you do not even have an OS that could support them.
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No, but I'd argue that you still need to research and find the correct one, obtain it, then somehow test it in a way that won't break the system. That takes time, effort, and money.
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They are not the only ones with this issue. Industrial floppy emulators exist, for example these here: https://www.cf2scsi.com/produc... [cf2scsi.com]
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I certainly wouldn't say that they're the only one, and I have the feeling that the emulator you linked is "expensive", well, not compared to replacing all the equipment, but probably still a few thousand.
Plus, well, you still have to test the thing, and how many of these would they need? Can they replace more of the system and avoid this?
Re: Why would that reassume me? (Score:2)
This is San Francisco we're talking about. The same city that overpays for non-standard rail components. They'll probably come up with something needlessly complex and spend a billion dollars on it, because jobs.
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Lots of systems are like this. That's because it costs taxpayer money to update it. So when there's budget to get a new system they money gets spent, then next year there is no money. Five years later, some updates could be made but there's no budget for it. Ten years later, a lot of changes need to be made, but no money for it. That's how public infrastructure is done. Private infrastructure, like in corporations, often has periodic updates even when some are not needed, because they have ready cash m
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"relies on three five-inch floppy disks" to boot up. The reporter was holding a 3.5-inch disk in the broadcast, so may have just skipped the word "point." The summary doesn't even make sense. Was it "three five-inch disks" or a "3.5-inch disk".
I think the latter half of your quote explains things quite well, a missing "point". Either misspoken or transcription error.
The real confusing bit is: "The agency noted that its system was installed in 1998, when floppies were still in common use and, er, "computers didn't have hard drives."
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er, "computers didn't have hard drives."
You're not the first to notice that lots of computers did in fact have hard drives in 1998. That's why there's the "er" and the quotes. The author could have put "[sic] [wikipedia.org]" instead of the "er", but who knows Latin or wants to look like a douche, right?
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Re: Why would that reassume me? (Score:2)
In 1992 you could definitely buy a computer without a hard drive. Amiga 500, Atari ST, Apple IIgs for example.
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In 1992 you couldn't buy a computer without a hard drive. (snip) Darn, I forgot about computers that at that point were either incredibly niche or were being discontinued.
Yea, three of the most popular personal computers in existence in their day were forgotten by you, someone who's willing to make an absolute statement that wasn't true. Or, perhaps you realize you got it wrong and weren't willing to own your error?
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the Atari ST and the Amiga were never popular.
You have got to be kidding....
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Population of the US in 1992: 255,175,338. Total Amiga sales in the US from launch in the mid-80s until discontinuation: 700,000
Population of the UK in 1992: 57,509,239. Total Amiga sales in the UK from launch in the mid-80s until discontinuation: 1.5 Million
I can't even find concrete stats on the Atari.
So yeah, the Amiga wasn't popular. Neither were popular. And I understand that the Amiga was better known. I get the whole getting caught up in a cool but relatively unknown computer. I had an original NeX
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The summary was perfectly clear that the reporter was holding up a 3.5" floppy as that was said, so it's more likely that "point" was droped rather than "and a quarter".