
Seattle's University Bridge still operates on Compaq 8080 and 5.25" Floppy disks - nkrumm
http://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2014/03/12/no-more-5-12-floppy-disks-university-bridge-openings-will-take-longer-as-city-updates-computer-wiring/
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nostromo
The original article is much more interesting and informative:
[http://blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2014/03/seattles-
univers...](http://blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2014/03/seattles-university-
bridge-undergoing-a-reboot/)

It also includes a picture of the computer:
[http://i.imgur.com/oK0eknm.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/oK0eknm.jpg)

~~~
flomo
Appears to be a Compaq Portable II, which is a 286 PC clone, not an 8080.

[http://oldcomputers.net/compaqii.html](http://oldcomputers.net/compaqii.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable_II)

~~~
greenyoda
Yeah, 8080s never ran MS-DOS. The original IBM PC, for which MS-DOS was
written, had an 8088 procesor.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
The original Compaq Portable that my family had growing up ran Compaq DOS,
IIRC.

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michaelhoffman
Yes, but it had an 8088, not an 8080.

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timr
_" you probably would have assumed there were sophisticated systems at work."_

That bridge was built at the turn of the century. I'm surprised to hear
there's a computer involved at all.

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caf
Wasn't the turn of the century only 14 years ago?

~~~
timr
Touché. Just used that phrase out of habit. I was (hopefully obviously)
referring to the century prior.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I enjoy referring to DEC and CP/M machines as turn of the century computers
:-). But the recent turn has left us with a linguistic equivalent to the Y2K
problem, which in itself is amusing in its own sort of way. :-)

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jarrett
Much of our infrastructure runs on old computers. That's not necessarily bad.
Assuming there's no network connection, configs are left unchanged, and
updates are not installed, neither bitrot nor vulnerabilities will bring down
the system. A hardware failure could, if compatible replacements aren't
available. The latter does occur.

Part of the reason for keeping these old systems is the risk in upgrading. The
software has been in service for years so it's relatively battle-tested. New
software comes with the risk of bugs and deployment problems. Bugs and
deployment problems can mean lengthy shutdowns of critical infrastructure (if
it proves impossible to bring the old system back into service as an emergency
measure).

So there is some wisdom in letting the old systems clunk along. Up to a point,
that is.

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jpwgarrison
I was waiting for the U-Bridge once at about 1am, and I had another ~14 miles
to ride on my bike before I got home.

For about 15 minutes, the bridge would open, almost close but then stop with
one side about 2 feet up.

I was NOT looking forward to riding around to another bridge.

Another cyclist rode up, watched one of these cycles, and then he looked over
at me and shrugged, rode up and did the ~2ft drop w/o incident.

I gave it about 30 seconds, looked around for cops and then went over myself.
It was one of the scariest things I have done, and I was just hyper-aware for
the rest of the ride home and woke up my housemates to tell them this story.

~~~
koenigdavidmj
The Ballard Bridge has been getting stuck more and more in recent months, it
seems.

And the University Bridge (or maybe it's Montlake) needs to get hosed down
with water every hour on hot days, or otherwise it will expand and be unable
to lift.

Welcome to Seattle.

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dugmartin
In the early 90s I saw a control system for a destructive ammunition test
center being run by a TRS-80 Color Computer I. They wanted to know if I could
update the software and handed me a thick greenbar printout of assembly code.
I didn't take the gig.

~~~
jhallenworld
What? And pass up the joy of writing 6809 assembly language? (well aside for
the 6809, the Color Computer was terrible).

~~~
bryanlarsen
OS-9 was another of the non-terrible things about the CoCo. It probably wasn't
running OS-9, though.

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egil
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." \- Bert Lance

~~~
ivanca
"If it ain't broke you still have to upgrade, because delay in doing so will
bring compatibly nightmares upon you" \- Ivanca

~~~
EpicEng
Compatibility with what? It's not being upgraded because _it works_. There's a
reason that most POS systems still look like something out of Tron. They work,
they're battle hardened, and they're fast. Upgrade to some new system and only
if you're a glutton for pain (unless you have to absolutely change systems for
some reason, then you're just forced to be in pain for a while.)

~~~
ghayes
and when a component breaks?

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egil
If it breaks, you surely need to fix it (and having plans to fix it or
upgrading it due to lack of replacement parts etc is of course neccessary).
However, there is also inherent risks in upgrading such appliances, so it
should not be done simply because the hardware is old.

~~~
pilsetnieks
From the original article:

> The old-school electric resistors and other parts are wearing out, so that
> replacements must be scavenged from city shops or eBay, he says. Finnick
> recalls a 12-hour stoppage, when the city used a backup diesel motor to lift
> the bridge for boats. Other times, the city dispatched a second bridge
> tender to help open the bridge manually.

It does break and replacement parts are hard to find.

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gaius
You can still buy 5 1/4" disks, because I do.

~~~
ezequiel-garzon
I'm curious, why do you use them instead of CDs, DVDs, external USB drives,
etc?

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Blahah
CDs, DVDs and USB sticks don't fit in a 5 1/4" disk drive.

~~~
keithpeter
Excellent answer Blahah.

Now, gaius, why do you need to use a 5.25 inch floppy disc drive instead of a
more recent storage medium?

If the answer is something along the lines of 'because that is all the old
computer can use' can you clarify if this is a retro hobby or an actual use
case?

~~~
gaius
I like to see how much real work I can do on 8-bit hardware, e.g. BBC micros,
VIC 20, so a bit of both. For example I plan technical dives using Buhlmann in
6502 assembler, printed on a dot matrix.

Come the infocalypse, everyone will work this way.

~~~
keithpeter
gaius, I worked that way for years! BBC Master with coprocessor and all for
general word processing and maths teaching.

Before that an Apple II and 5.25 inch disc drive used to control the
temperature of a cryostat and log data.

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Aardwolf
The PC seems alright to me (after all, how much CPU do you need to open a
bridge...), but the floppies seem a bit fragile and unreliable, they lose data
pretty fast.

~~~
DSMan195276
That's what I'm thinking too. The fact that it's old and running MS-DOS
doesn't seem like much of a big deal to me considering it's not networked and
only has one job to do that it's already capable of doing. They should
probably just go get a cheep IDE HDD, copy the floppy onto it and boot from
there. But other then that, I don't see tons of issues.

This does however seem like a fairly obvious use-case for an embedded
solution. No floppies, no moving parts, etc.. It would last much longer then
this computer will. It's not like the computer was doing much anyway (I mean,
besides signaling motors, I'm not really sure what the computer was even
doing).

~~~
pantalaimon
An IDE Flash drive would be even better, they are pretty cheap as well.

~~~
mark-r
I had no idea IDE flash drives existed until you said so, but indeed there's
quite a few. Just for situations such as this probably.

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gtirloni
Does anyone know what they are going to replace it with?

Please tell me it's not a desktop computer again, with rotating disks, fans
and all those lovely things that, you know, fail constantly.

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jcrawfordor
I got a tour of the Burnside Bridge in Portland twice when I was in probably
middle school, a couple years apart. The first time, the operator had a big
panel of giant switches and buttons with a relay interlock system to make sure
things proceeded in the right order. The second time, the control system had
been replaced by a single color LCD touchscreen with what I can only describe
as the bridge opening wizard... complete with a "Next >" button.

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digikata
The long term sustainment / archival aspects of this are really interesting.
With the new replacement system, is the company just rebuilding it from
scratch? Are there design documents or source code they have access to from
the old system? Is the new company going to be required to escrow similar
design elements?

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kalleboo
I'm mostly surprised it's a personal computer and not a relay network like
elevators were/are typically controlled by.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GevDdd_IOY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GevDdd_IOY)

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sthu11182
I remember an old IEEE article on the NYC subway system. There were portions
of the system that was built in the 1900's that still controls the tracks. The
MTA was afraid of removing the old system because they had no idea how it
worked.

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joshu
blog spam.

~~~
Cthulhu_
click 'flag' button

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laichzeit0
Better to replace it with an embedded controller with no moving parts. Buy a
couple of these and flash them with the same firmware and replace the whole
thing if it ever dies.

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netghost
Heh, I literally just biked over the University Bridge.

If you think that's old, you should see what our transportation infrastructure
(stop lights, loop detectors, etc.) run on.

