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A comment on FAA Issues National Ground Stop. Parent comment

Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by PLenz on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:28PM (#50490010)
From what I know of the ATC system it's closer to IBM System 360 then to Microsoft 365
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by genxy on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:38PM (#50490187)
Microsoft 363
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by bee_rider on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:10PM (#50490670)
Give them a couple days and they can reach numerical parity with IBM there!
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by nxobject on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:40PM (#50490216)
That's a little unfair to IBM – sure, you're just as beholden to them for life, but at least the service engineer gets to your rack before you know something's gone wrong!
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by xattt on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:47PM (#50490342)
[delayed]
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by PLenz on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:48PM (#50490344)
@nxobject I meant litterally. The ATC system is derived from the IBM 9020 which was itself a set of interconnected System 360 systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_9020

I believe it's all virtualized today

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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by femto on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:46PM (#50491211)
That explains the outage. We're just in one of the 5 days of the year they don't cover...

I did a tour of Adelaide airport with Engineers Australia in the 1990s. We visited their obsolete IBM main frame, still running ATC in their computer room. They were tied to it by the certification of the software it was running. Just as you described.

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