According to foreign media Tom’s Hardware, the acting director of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) publicly announced last Wednesday that it would upgrade the existing air traffic control system (ATC):
"Our purpose is to completely replace the entire system and no longer use floppy disks and paper."
It is reported that from the end of April to mid-May this year, there were frequent calls and disconnection accidents at Newark Airport in New York, USA, with the longest disconnection time reaching 90 seconds, which may be the fuse for the announcement of the elimination of the old system.
At present, the Federal Aviation Administration is investing a lot of money every year to maintain this old system that has been around for more than 20 or even nearly 30 years. Since manufacturers have stopped producing certain electronic parts, in order to maintain the normal operation of the system, they have to go to personal merchants such as ebay to purchase second-hand hardware to replace damaged parts.
But it was also a blessing in disguise. In the global Microsoft system downtime in July last year, the US air traffic control system was too old and was not affected by CrowdStrike's software updates.
In addition to the US air traffic control system, there are still many public systems in the world that rely on old Windows 95 systems, or even DOS systems. Taking the San Francisco Muni Metro subway control system as an example, the system needs to use 3 5-inch floppy disks as storage medium every day to start the train control program based on the DOS system. In order to ensure that the system can be repaired in time when the system is down, it is also necessary to hire old programmers who are proficient in DOS programming. This programming language of the last century is now like the strangeness of ancient Chinese.
