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Comment by ic_fly2 | Hacker News Reader

What I don’t understand in such reports is why there is no mention at all how this is done in other countries. Do they all still use floppy disks? Did they do an upgrade? How did it go? Surely this would be valuable information.

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Back in the 90s, a portion of Germany's ATC ran on Emacs Lisp. No floppies though.

https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/do_you_use_em...

A considerable number of countries use systems based on ex-Eurocat now TopSky, for their air traffic controllers, which is a distributed system.

Install and updates are via a registry based system, and it supports Windows, Linux, macOS - because its mostly written in Ada and R, as of 2012. (Most are running on top of Linux, as far as I'm aware).

No floppy disks, no underrunning DOS, etc.

Is this one of those things like phones or banking where the early adopters are stuck with old tech due to inertia while late adopters are using newer technology?

I think truth is more so that each is using contemporary technology from time the project started. So those that started later have newer. But that does not mean modern. As in current day.

A lot of airports are privately or quasi privately (Canada has a non profit called NavCanada) run which allows for advance planning of CapEx instead of depending on Congress. The US system where the FAA oversees and runs ATC is, to put it nicely, unique.

I don't think so. I believe the UK had their own, but NATS chose to switch in about 2002, and finished transition in 2007.

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