Quote:
Originally Posted by Kisai
There are only two good reasons, and several bad ones to replace hardware:
1) it is impossible to source new old stock(NOS) parts. As an example, there are still millions of floppy drives out there, but nobody produces blank disks anymore. However, floppy-drive emulators do exist, and they can be produced cheaper than sourcing an OEM NOS floppy drive. Then you just stick an SD card or USB stick in that and you're golden.
2) Voltage and frequency differences in integration. Good luck installing old SCADA ISA expansions boards from a 386 or 486 into a Xeon E5.
Bad reasons
1) newer stuff is easier to manage. This is never, ever, true. Often people like accountants or marketing people like some fancy new system, that the underlying tech is actually no different.
2) newer thing costs less to run(eg less people or energy costs) as this often ignores the costs of switching and running two systems in parallel while the news stuff is trained.
3) someone sees obsolete things like floppy drives, tape drives, CD-roms, CRT screens, etc somewhere and wants to replace it because it's embarrassing to show the media and tourists.
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You're more or less right on the money. The thing is, you can go and replace components of an industrial control system piecemeal but the way the whole system is designed cannot just go and be replaced.
You could go and do something like replace the floppy drive with something that emulates one, but it may also be problematic if you have a support contract with a firm that may not support that. The hardware may not be under warranty (and undoubtedly this is the case here) but there are cases where you can get a contract with someone to handle obsolete software and hardware.
I'd be reluctant to use a floppy drive emulator in any ICS setup even considering that I own one.
The underlying protocols and standards that SkyTrain and other ICS implementations has not changed all that much if at all in the past few decades. The physical implementation has definitely changed with the onset of 802.11 and other protocols (heck even ZigBee is showing up often in ICS but that too is about 20-years old), but networking is a multi-layered approach and hasn't fundamentally changed since the early 1980s.
Now, the suggestion that one can just go and buy up floppy diskettes on Amazon is a tad problematic since floppy disks made in the 1980s and through to the mid to late 1990s tend to be really reliable, but anytime after that is a huge 🞵🞵🞵🞵-shoot in terms of quality.
At the end of the day, SkyTrain's design is meant to last more than three decades and I am more than willing to bet that while the computers will be replaced in the near future, the overall design and signalling system will more or less remain the same long past my departure from this planet. I know that for some of you you're looking at it as everything is antiquated, but bear in mind that we're lucky to have a system that allows for signal reversals from the ground-up whereas other systems are going through growing pains to implement such (*cough*TTC*cough*).
Heck, go to New York City and you'll realise that the traffic lights while maybe having LEDs within are still running on mechanical clocks driven by the city's electricity. It was really weird to see one in action in the middle of Manhattan but they're there and they still work.
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