Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

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> For retrofit purposes, it's probably attainable to use solid state (no moving parts) floppy disk emulators that use USB thumb drives or CF/SD cards instead of error-prone, real floppy disks.

Yes, but if it is just a PC running Windows 95, likely simpler to get the software working under newer Windows, or if worst comes to worst, keep Windows 95 and stick it in a VM. I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else.

The use case where physical floppy emulators really shine is with much more exotic legacy systems. Some years ago there was a furore that the US nuclear arsenal was still being managed using 8-inch floppy disks (used in IBM Series/1s, 16-bit minicomputers from the 1970s). USAF was proud to publicly announce they’d successfully transitioned the US nuclear arsenal to be floppy-free. I don’t know if they said publicly exactly how they did it, but I suspect they kept the Series/1 minicomputers and just replaced the 8-inch floppy drives with hardware emulators (which probably each cost an utter fortune when you add up the premiums anyone will charge for it being the military, being highly classified, and above all being related to glowing things that go boom)

> USAF was proud to publicly announce they’d successfully transitioned the US nuclear arsenal to be floppy-free. I don’t know if they said publicly exactly how they did it,

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...

> I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else.

Based on my experience with older government systems, this is likely an incorrect assumption. It was extremely popular in the 90s to create custom hardware that integrated directly to windows machines. I've had to reverse engineer so many drivers to upgrade old bespoke equipment to integrate with newer OSs

The reason why I doubt it for the FAA, is I know in the 1990s the core ATC system ran on IBM mainframes and the specialised equipment was directly or indirectly connected to the mainframes. Hence, I expect the Windows PCs were used to run terminal emulators, email/messaging, various auxiliary applications.

I guess these hardware emulators are quite cheap on aliexpress, but then obivously for anything critical...

A hardware emulator is basically any hardware in the last decade capable of running QEMU or other virtualization solution.

> likely simpler to get the software working under newer Windows,

famous last words. /s

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