ATC Message Block

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Most airlines have a limited set of floppies that they cycle, as the actual updates come digitally. They copy out to diskettes and run to the aircraft. Every so often, a diskette breaks. These things get REALLY expensive.


Hoppie

[John H Watson]

Jeroen, you can still buy them on eBay for a few dollars 

[Will]

Fascinating. I can easily believe that 3.5" floppy disks are still being used.

It's a long story, but I just got a shipment of things that I'd put in storage when I was a teenager in the 1980's and moved away from home to go to school. The items included an Atari 800 computer with 48k RAM, a 5 1/4" disk drive, and two joysticks. And a copy of MSFS version 1.0 or something like that, on 5 1/4" floppies, of course. I remember reading in my old notes that it was (A) important to use floppy disks that were "double density," and (B) that you could convert a 1-sided disk into a 2-sided disk by using a hole punch to punch out a small section near the top. Back when I was 14 years old, I thought I was pretty smart for doubling the capacity of my storage that way.

Apropos to this discussion, everything seemed to be built to some sort of MilSpec conditions. You could jump up and down on the Atari disk drive and it won't break. I'm sure that's what Boeing insists on now, metaphorically and literally, before allowing an upgrade in the computational flight systems.