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A comment on FAA Begins Retiring Decades Old Floppy Disks from Air Traffic Control. Parent comment

Re:FAA Begins Retiring Decades Old Floppy Disks from Air Tra... by cogman10 on Friday November 06, 2026 @01:57PM (#50396713)
> Of course at some point you're at risk of hardware failures too, for things that are likely NLA.

Yeah, that's really the biggest issue with these systems. Were I one of these manufacturers I'd invest in getting the current software running in a VM specifically to make it easier to transition to new hardware. The last thing they'll want to deal with is that their software was written for Sun Spark and that no longer exists.

That said, hard to go wrong porting over the x86 at this point.

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Re:FAA Begins Retiring Decades Old Floppy Disks from Air Tra... by ajxs on Friday November 06, 2026 @03:05PM (#50397649)
> ...getting the current software running in a VM specifically to make it easier to transition to new hardware.

Some of the signal control infrastructure for the Melbourne rail network was ported over to an emulated PDP-11 System for this reason. This was previously discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514553

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