I’m trying to justify that in my head, but the only idea that I have is that “old” hard drives couldn’t handle the vibrations of a train. But flash existed even back then, and floppies aren’t exactly known for their high capacity.
Comment on Leading the world in technology and ecological transit.. on 3.5"
Buffalox@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Turns out that in 1998, SFMTA had the latest cutting edge technology when they installed their automatic train control system.
"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
Aaaand that’s when I stopped reading.
agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 7 months ago
db2@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yeah they’re over a decade off from computers that didn’t come equipped with one by default.
Greg@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Haha, that was literally the exact same point I stopped reading. I have emails older than this system and they weren’t stored on floppys 😂
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
An interesting thought, that the author of that article is younger than me, possibly like 5+ years younger. And I’m only a bit under 28. Scary how it ticks.
stoly@lemmy.world 7 months ago
First several generations of hard drives really were awful and broke if you stared at them at them wrong. Floppies were more reliable, cheaper, and easy to get.
frezik@midwest.social 7 months ago
By 1998? No, they were standard by then. Floppies were headed towards the end of their lifecycle with a high failure rate due to cutting costs.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I’m not sure what time you talk about, but it must be before 5,25" 20MB MFM drives and 30 MB RLL. Which were way more reliable than floppy disks and diskettes. These drives were available in the mid 80’s.
reddit.com/…/the_original_20mb_mfm_hdd_died_in_my…
Maybe you are mistaking a few bad blocks that were allocated out in the allocation table, for being unreliable?
stoly@lemmy.world 7 months ago
HDDs before, say, 1986, were junk. Those that came after will still very expensive until the late 90s, when prices started to drop.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Incidentally 1986 was the year I got my first hard-drive. ;)
And yes they were absolutely expensive in the mid 80’s. The first 20MB MFM i bought was almost $1000 USD. This was in Europe, prices were probably lower in USA.
But I worked as manager for a computer shop, and the 4 years I worked in that, we only had 1 defect under warranty.I remember it clearly, because it was a woman coming in with her computer saying her hard-drive was defect, most people being somewhat ignorant of computers, often called the whole computer hard-drive, and since defects were rare, I obviously thought she meant the computer. But no she actually knew what she was talking about, and she was the unlucky one to get the only defect hard-drive we ever delivered! OK my memory may not be perfect, there may have been others, but it certainly wasn’t considered a problem in general.
But I remember I heard about defects, very old Seagate drives could get stuck, if that happened, I was told you could tap them against the table flat down, and that would often resolve the issue!!!
Apart from that, I was much more confident with drives back then, because you could actually hear if they were going bad, as the drive would make a suspicious sound in its attempt to calibrate and reread, with a surface scan you could see if they were actually going bad, or it was just some unusual file operation. Generally in time to switch to another drive before actually losing any files. There may be some truth to drives being more unreliable back then, but they were (so to speak) more unreliable in a more reliable way.
Today this functionality is hidden in the SMART system, which I find unreliable. Drives reallocate bad blocks themselves keeping the user ignorant, until suddenly they are completely dead.
CrayonRosary@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Maybe they meant home computers, and that’s all most of their audience will picture in their heads, anyway. But yeah, not a very good computer historian.
frezik@midwest.social 7 months ago
Home computers had hard drives by then. This was after Win95 was out.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Sure computers had a hard drive, but it was the style at the time to remove them and use them as lifts in our shoes. You could tell who the poors were because they walked with a limp on account of only having one computer.
GeekySalsa@lemmy.world 7 months ago
This comment has major Grampa Simpson vibes and I love it.
essteeyou@lemmy.world 7 months ago
… we wore an onion on our hips, as was the fashion at the time…