作者 | 李冬梅、核子可乐
Today, when the AIGC is in full swing, the San Francisco subway in the United States is still using the obsolete floppy disk technology, while the New York subway is still stuck in the IT architecture of 100 years ago.
With its strong creativity and learning ability, AIGC is setting off a technological revolution around the world, and behind this technological revolution, it is inseparable from the support of advanced computer hardware and efficient software systems. Regrettably, however, some organizations are still using outdated computer equipment and outdated software technology to prepare for a rapidly changing future.
Recently, the San Francisco Department of Transportation's train system has attracted attention because it is "fully manual and continues to have floppy disk components that are dozens of years old".
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In Silicon Valley, where IT is leading, San Francisco's train control system relies on floppy disks to keep it running...... How is this possible? Katie Guillen, a local passenger, was surprised, "Huh? I thought we were in the age of AI and ended up using floppy disks?"
San Francisco's "antique" train control system has sparked heated discussions, and it can't go without a floppy disk
The San Francisco Transportation Authority (SFMTA), which operates the local subway light rail system, claims to be the first agency in the nation to use floppy media. But now, the Department of Transportation is rushing to abandon its reliance on 5-inch floppy disks, provided that ...... Give them about ten years plus hundreds of millions of dollars in investment.
To give the public more detailed information, several San Francisco Department of Transportation staff members were recently interviewed by ABC7 Bay Area News about how the agency uses three 5-inch floppy disks to start the train control system every morning.
Since being installed at the Market Street subway station in 1998, these floppy disks have been an important part of Muni Metro's San Francisco Metro Automatic Train Control System (ATCS). Now, 26 years later, the Transit Authority's staff still rely on floppy disks every morning to direct how trains run.
Although the system is "old" now, turning the clock back to 1998, when the San Francisco Department of Transportation deployed the automatic train control system, it was indeed using the most cutting-edge technological achievements.
Mariana Mauire from the Transportation Bureau's Train Control Project explains, "We were the first organization in the U.S. to adopt this particular technology, when computers didn't even have disk drives, and software had to be loaded onto computers via floppy disks. ”
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When asked by journalist Luz Pena "What is the role of the floppy disk in the train control system?", Mariana Maguire replied: "The floppy disk is part of the whole system, which is responsible for the automatic control of the trains in the subway. The metro systems we operate across the city contain a large number of components that rely on floppy disks to operate. ”
This means that the San Francisco Transportation Authority's train control system must be activated every morning with the help of a 5-inch floppy disk.
Another Transport Authority spokesperson, Michael Roccaforte, explained in detail how the system works. The control system consists of several components, including an on-board computer that connects to the communication infrastructure such as the propulsion/braking system, central and local servers, and loop signaling cables. The main purpose of these floppy disks is to load the software that runs the central server. Roccaforte noted:
When the train enters the subway station, the on-board computer will be connected to the train control system to drive the train in automatic mode, ensuring that the vehicle runs on its own under the supervision of the operator. When exiting the metro station, the vehicle disconnects from the control system and returns to manual operation.
Mariana Mauire points out that "the whole system was turned off at night as if it had lost its memory. By the next morning, someone has to remind it again, "Who you are and what you need to achieve today." ”
Why hasn't the old system been replaced? Why wasn't the floppy disk upgraded to a wireless transmission system?
Jeffrey Tumlin, the agency's director of transportation, said in an interview, "This creates new risks. The system is working well, and we certainly know that the risk of floppy disk data degradation is increasing over time, and it can even lead to catastrophic failure at any time. ”
Roccaforte said initial plans for a complete overhaul of the train control system, including the elimination of floppy disks, began as early as 2018 and are expected to take a decade from initial planning to final completion. Due to an 18-month disruption to progress due to the coronavirus outbreak, actual completion is expected to be pushed back to 2029 to 2030. The San Francisco Department of Transportation expects to identify the contractor in early 2025, at which time a detailed project timeline will be released.
The system upgrade takes a decade and costs hundreds of millions of dollars
As the saying goes, "As long as it's not broken, use it." "But while floppy disk train control systems are still functioning today, there are still significant risks associated with continuing to rely on outdated technology. The San Francisco Department of Transportation has also been highlighting this issue for years.
According to the transportation bureau, the train control system is designed to last only 20 to 25 years, which means that it will be an unplanned use cycle from 2023 onwards. The Municipal Reliability Working Group, which is said to be made up of local and national traffic experts, proposed in 2020 that a new traffic control system be established within five to seven years.
When asked how "urgent" it is to upgrade existing floppy disk systems, Tumlin said the key is risk.
Previously, the San Francisco Department of Transportation has said that the maintenance of train control systems is becoming more difficult and expensive over time. They also admit that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find technicians for such outdated systems.
In an interview last year, Tumlin admitted, "We have to retain programmers who are proficient in the programming languages of the '90s to keep the system running, which means that our technical debt goes back decades." ”
In 2020, a department spokesperson testified to the San Francisco Chronicle that at the time, 40 to 50 percent of undergraduates were transit bureau traffic controllers.
When asked if abandoning the floppy disk system would lead to layoffs, Roccaforte responded:
With the launch of the new train control system, there are still plenty of positions for existing employees to choose from and receive the corresponding technical training. A key part of our upgrade strategy is developing internal skills and training our existing staff. In addition, we needed to hire more technical personnel, such as signal engineers, to help support the new train control system.
In a 2020 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Tumoin noted that he had learned about the system as early as 2007 and needed an update, but acknowledged that there was no "imminent need for an upgrade" on its own.
"While we still rely on a DOS system loaded from a 5-inch floppy disk, the whole system works well. ”
Mariana Maguire, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Department of Transportation, said in an interview with ABC7 last week that the upgrade will allow the train control system to "easily track the movement and movement of trains across the city with the help of autonomous driving technology, while enhancing human intervention." ”
However, budgetary challenges have called into question the project's scheduled timeline. Roccaforte said the Authority's train upgrade project involved not only the floppy disk migration, but also "a complete overhaul of the current train control system and all of its components, including on-board computers, central and local servers, and communications infrastructure." ”
More important than the old floppy disk system is the loop cable system, which is responsible for transferring data between the central server and the train. According to Roccaforte, "The bandwidth is not even as wide as that of the early AOL dial-up modems. ”
The San Francisco Department of Transportation added on its official website:
Loop cables are fragile and prone to interference, making subway maintenance more difficult. This means that the system cannot be extended along the at-grade light rail beyond the metro station, so automatic train control is not yet possible in the at-grade environment.
Roccaforte also mentioned that the Transport Authority is planning to upgrade to "modern communication technologies, such as fiber optics or Wi-Fi".
Tumlin stressed that the Department of Transportation expects state and federal grants to cover a "significant portion" of the budget for train control system upgrades, while "the rest is absorbed by the city's rapidly dwindling internal funding for municipal railroads." The Department of Transportation declined to disclose the amount of money it has spent so far on system updates.
Not only has the San Francisco Department of Transportation relied on floppy disks for years, but it has also maintained long-standing partnerships with other organizations that use floppy disk storage, including cargo airlines and textile suppliers that offer custom embroidery.
Why are old IT systems so hard to replace?
It's nothing new that some parts of the U.S. are being criticized for their aging IT systems. A few years ago, some media revealed that the subway in New York, the global trade center, was delayed almost every day. Because the New York City subway system uses pre-World War II technology.
The delay was caused by the old communication system that controls the train, but even that would have taken six years and $288 million to install on a subway line.
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At West Fourth Street Station, Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees manually record train movements.
In an interview with Business Insider, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority employee said, "In our system, there are not only 100-year-old architectures, but also a lot of age-old underlying technologies. ”
The employee also said it would take nearly 10 years and $20 billion to replace the 100-year-old traffic lights and manually controlled switches on the New York subway and upgrade the aging system.
According to a Hacker News user who lives in San Francisco and has the ID iancmceachern, this is more common in the machine tool sector (milling machines, lathes, etc.). He once sent an email to the transportation bureau to express his concern about the floppy disk problem, and the transportation bureau replied to him: "The floppy disk incident is a matter of concern, but in fact, this is only the tip of the iceberg." Every layer of the old system needed to be replaced."
For users with the ID jandrese, these old systems have great hidden dangers, floppy disks are more common antique parts, and it will be more troublesome if you put other unpopular hardware on the table. He said:
Floppy disk emulators are everywhere thanks to the efforts of the retro computing community. However, for companies that have gone bankrupt with custom boards, opaque ROM chips, emulators for PLAs, and other devices, the challenge is much greater once something goes wrong. If they have a good circuit diagram of all the parts, they may be able to keep the system running for a long time with a few smart electronics engineers who are familiar with the circuits and soldering irons, but they may end up running out of some unpopular part and getting bogged down.
It is worth mentioning that some people believe that although the update cycle is long, the update cycle is within reason. For example, the Breda train, which entered service in 1996, began to be phased out after about 20 years of use, and most people generally agreed that it was a reasonable time to make some updates. Those who lived through the era of 5.25-inch floppy disks may be able to understand that when the system has fulfilled its mission, the replacement is justified. At that point, it's not just the storage media that needs to be replaced, and it won't need to be replaced until it's up and running.
A Hacker News user with the ID Workaccount2 agrees. Their company supplies new computing modules for the infrastructure of another global metropolis that still relies on Intel CPUs from the early 80s of the 20th century. That is, their company is installing new circuit boards for mechanisms that house chips that are more than 40 years old.
"They didn't show any interest in updating the system," Workaccount2 said. This system is working properly, and they can get service and new replacements for broken parts. ”
But what customers may not know is that basically only one of our engineers (and probably the only one on the planet) knows how to fix these things. He was already very old, and apparently the young engineer had no interest in learning these ancient forgotten systems at all.
Despite the widespread discussion, some netizens believe that the transportation bureau's use of floppy disks to this day is justified, because local floppy disks are more secure than going to the cloud.
Users with Zuu47 IDs say that people don't realize that new systems on the cloud can be hacked and that it's safer to use floppy disks.
To sum up, these old IT systems installed in the field of machine tools are difficult to replace for three reasons: first, the system is still usable and not to the extent that it must be replaced, second, the replacement cost is too high, often hundreds of millions of dollars, and third, the amount of work is too large and takes many years.
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It's 2024, and the American subway is still "dead" on the floppy disk and the architecture of 100 years ago, netizens: It's safer not to go to the cloud_Business architecture_Li Dongmei_InfoQ featured articles