In my experience that's normally the fault of third-party software, and otherwise quite easy to determine and avoid/fix. Now OSes with more protections just hide those bugs, causing most software to regress to a barely-working state.

I ran 98SE as a daily driver from late 1999 until 2010, and it was reinstalled at most 3 times, not even coinciding with hardware upgrades.

Every year you delay is pushing that lower, and then there's whether the funding is available because you're in fairweather economic conditions or if crisis will happen concordantly with some other crisis (I.e. do you want to be stuck replacing air traffic control systems in a rush because some war has wiped out the floppy supply chain right as your air logistics is a critical issue?)

I can see it already actually : "The FAA was working fine and yet they want these X billions to have shiny new silicon valley machines, paid to big tech by the tax payers"

As horrible as that sounds, I don't think many people would say that it couldn't happen.

It’s about as effective as placing a monkey in a porcelain shop then walking away while commenting loudly “Now now, it is very important none of the porcelain breaks, everyone knows it must remain intact”. The monkey doesn’t give a shit.

Butchering a proverb: “The best time to reorganise your porcelain store was before you bought a monkey. The second best time is after you sell the monkey.”

They only said a “highly-secure solid state digital storage solution”. At least that's all I could find.[0] The article indicates that things get repaired down to the "component level", but specialist civilians.

And this bit was interesting as well:

"While SACC’s hardware is decades old, its software is constantly refreshed by young Air Force programmers who learn software development skills at Offutt’s Rapid Agile Development Lab. Most work on the software and interfaces seen by end-users like intercontinental ballistic missile launch crews, rewriting legacy code to make it more modern and sustainable, said Master Sgt. Travis Menard, 595th SCS’s programming section chief."

[0] https://www.c4isrnet.com/air/2019/10/17/the-us-nuclear-force...

famous last words. /s

ATC is a safety-critical function that has what amounts to a 100% uptime requirement. Whatever system they're running currently either works or has known flaws that they know how to work around, and air traffic controllers have been trained on these systems for more than a generation now. Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date would have been foolish no matter how much funding Congress would have given them.

If they're saying that they need the upgrade now, I'll trust them on that, but it was the right call to make it last.

"I stopped counting long ago, but there have been many, many attempts to try to modernize the US’s air traffic control (ATC) system over the years"

https://crankyflier.com/2025/05/12/the-us-government-tries-t...

I am sure you can find better sources as there are so many of them.

So OK, if you want to do development in this space, do learn about the US setup from a retired old fart who worked with paper strips and thinks the system should stay like this forever. But also learn about systems in Europe, Japan and other places; and realize that ATC can move away from the stone age. My 2c.

That's a bit overkill in the world of DOGE. They'll just use some AI to design a system by a bunch of 20-somethings that have no experience whatsoever. Then, they'll come here and brag about it.

I've worked around some of these programs. I've had visibility into some of them for 15 years over which there has been zero forward progress despite unreasonably large amounts of money being spent. It is no secret why those programs are permanently broken but no one wants to have that conversation.

This is to get rid of the media only. You'll still be using the original compute hardware. But it would be an interesting step.

I feel that most of the desire to upgrade is cultural and not technical. People love to talk about the floppies being used while its just a small part of the equation. Cost and risk of creating a new system with the same reliability expectations is hard when the incumbent has decades of iteration. For systems that do not require more performance or energy efficiency the accounting on upgrading looks very different.

> In May 2023, MartyPC became the first PC emulator capable of emulating every effect in the PC demo Area 5150.

[0] https://martypc.net/

"It's not broken" is the cry of the bad manager that hasn't done the proper analysis, hasn't actually looked at the pros and cons, but has simply become complacent and comfortable with the devil they know.

If they're still using physical floppies, then their process is broken now, so virtualising it will almost certainly un-break it.

A simple "clarifier" for this kind of thought process that I like to use is: If you were already using the new option (virtualised legacy hardware), would you think it a good idea to convert it to using open drives with convenient dust ingress, non-existent support and supply chain, glacially slow mechanical moving parts, and hilariously antiquated crunching noises for all data access? Would you? Really? Or would you recoil in horror at the very idea?

I use the same kind of logic on people who think staying on Windows Server 2012 in <current year> is a good idea. Would you downgrade Windows Server 2025 to 2012? Why not? You think it's a great platform, apparently!

PS: I worked on a large scale DOS-era software virtualisation project where we moved ~20K users onto a Windows + Citrix platform. We eliminated about 6000 floppy drives and about a million(!) tapes, and the resulting system was so much faster and reliable than the original that people were trying to bribe the project manager to be put at the front of the migration queue.

The EU has been almost single-handedly designing the international interoperability standards for the kinds of information that the US uses floppies to move around.

I'm not sure any country still remembers the lessons that would be useful for the US on this one situation.

There is also some work by the germans on moving the TID part to a web-based approach.

Also you need to handle planes without computers - you can land a personal plane at almost any airport. (With lots of caveats but still) Also you need to handle planes with failing automation. Also you really want to know the situation on the runways, so there's really no need to remove the single source of truth here.

YOLO i guess? :)

Hypothetically the nearby planes can detect that unresponsive plane on radar or other sensors, and try to react together as an intelligent swarm, to avoid it and let that plane land manually. But it’s not so simple. Planes are not loaded with full fuel tanks, only a bit extra. Some planes may have already underwent a go-around if the airport is busy. So it’s not just “land without crashing”, it’s also a prioritization issue.

IMO we certainly need humans in the loop, in a centralized fashion, to “orchestrate” a manual emergency landing if there is some critical cascading failure or bug in the software. I agree that in the happy path (99% of cases) it’s possible to automate it all. In theory.

Things get more complicated when you consider that small planes (flown for hobby, flight school, etc) have waaaaay less tech. That can’t work in some peer to peer fashion without a major upgrade to all those planes too. And the owners of those planes are not corporations making billions.