[HN Gopher] The Forgotten Operating System That Keeps the NYC Su...
___________________________________________________________________
The Forgotten Operating System That Keeps the NYC Subway System
Alive (2019)
Author : lproven
Score : 112 points
Date : 2022-10-07 22:02 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| If it takes years and billions to build a simple high speed rail
| line from San Francisco to LA then NYC subway this will still be
| around in it's current state.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| The articles makes vague complains and leaves many questions
| unanswered.
|
| First, I don't get the primary complaint in the article. The MTA
| chose OS/2 in the early 1990s, when there no other choices and it
| has served the MTA for almost 30 years with minimal hassles of
| upgrades or outages. I can't recall a single day when the
| Metrocard was not working - sure there are problems but it is
| more a UI/UX issue - a app that shows you Metrocard usage and
| balance would be insanely useful but we lack small mercies but
| hey you can pay with your smartwatch /s.
|
| A piece of technology that is stable for 30 years is remarkable.
| Even if they had gone with Linux/NT the upgrade cycles themselves
| would have wreaked havoc. OS/2 seems like a brilliant choice in
| that regard.
|
| Questions left unaddressed:
|
| - What tech did they move to now with contactless payments?
|
| - The move to contactless payments is awesome but what happens to
| people who lack smartphones or do not have credit cards or <big-
| tech>-pay setup on their phones. Or just casual tourists visiting
| from overseas with no US cards. How do they pay? Do they keep
| supporting metrocards forever? Does that mean to support
| Metrocards they need OS/2 and assorted new systems.
|
| - What is the mainframe part of the stack and what function does
| it do.
| cnorthwood wrote:
| I was recently in New York as a Brit and was really happy to
| see the OMNY system which just allowed me to use contactless to
| traverse the turnstiles (for everything but the JFK SkyTrain)
| with no issues, similar to how metro transport works in the UK
| for example. I don't think there's a requirement for it to be a
| US card, but instead any contactless card will work?
| [deleted]
| wikibob wrote:
| As it turns out:
|
| "The OMNY system is designed by Cubic Transportation Systems,
| using technology licensed from Transport for London's Oyster
| card."
|
| https://www.cubic.com/news-events/news/cubic-wins-
| contract-n...
| em-bee wrote:
| NT maybe, but linux not so much. that linux machine would still
| be running. and don't argue security patches, because OS/2 is
| not getting those either.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| The system went live in 1993 so what distro would they have
| chosen in ~1990, when the system choice was made and is that
| distro still around? How many ports would they have had to
| make over the ensuing years.
|
| I love Linux and use it everyday but it would have been a
| poor choice in 1990 and some would argue would still be a
| poor choice today given other industrial OS-es on the market.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Seeing as Linux didn't exist in 1990, it would have been an
| exceptionally poor choice. Early distros were pretty rough,
| but honestly by 93/94 it was reasonably useful and, if you
| didn't have defective hardware, which was a huge problem at
| the time, quite stable.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| OS/2 failed because of IBM's abysmal marketing, not because it
| was inferior tech.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| And 18 floppy discs to install...
| queuebert wrote:
| Back then 18 floppies added gravitas. Only big important
| things would take up this many disks.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| There was a time when OS/2 Warp was marketed heavily in my
| country (the Netherlands) and there was quite a bit if hype
| around it. If you bought a new PC at the time it came with both
| OS/2 and Windows 3.11.
|
| The main problem with it was that is was basically unusable on
| consumer hardware at the time. We got a new 80Mhz 486 with 4MB
| RAM around that time and it was just incredibly slow, while
| Win3.11 ran just fine.
|
| With hardware advancing at an incredible pace back then, it
| might have had a better chance it they had delayed it by a
| year.
| throwawayForMe2 wrote:
| Back when the company I was working for was trying to decide
| between OS/2 and Windows NT we took a trip to both Microsoft
| and IBM to get their pitch.
|
| Microsoft had us meet in Redmond, gave us a tour, free books
| from their bookstore, brought in an Indian chef for lunch (our
| boss was Indian), gave a big splashy presentation, etc.
|
| IBM met us in a dingy conference room in LA, with a whiteboard,
| don't even remember any coffee or bagles. The two guys they
| sent came across like bad car salesmen, and we were a big IBM
| customer.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I've noticed a pattern where some sales teams treat their
| existing customers poorly because they assume they are
| already locked-in.
| tb_technical wrote:
| That's flipping wild to me. I work in the evil defence
| industry (some sarcasm here).
|
| They're so vigilant about bribery that when someone (a
| general, or someone important) goes to a contractor
| presentation it's *expected* that there's a little can they
| put fifty cents or a few bucks into to pay for their share of
| the bagels.
|
| And if this can doesn't exist? Everyone gets very
| uncomfortable very quickly - _literal jobs are at stake_.
|
| Other industries are just wild, man.
| walrus01 wrote:
| apparently that DoD employee who went to boeing after
| deciding the tanker contract didn't get that memo - as I
| recall she later went to prison.
| tb_technical wrote:
| The revolving door problem is another unique form of
| corruption that military contracting has to deal with.
|
| Somewhat related, to get my current job I had to sign a
| bunch of conflict of interest forms because I jumped
| ships from one side to the other. So some controls exist
| for the behaviour you brought up!
|
| I'm not saying this stuff never happens, either, I'm just
| remarking that the professional standards and
| expectations are very different in military contracting
| versus software.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I think one of the reasons it's a bigger issue in future
| military systems contracts is that they're usually art-
| of-the-possible.
|
| So there's a lot of arbitrary requirement shifting
| between actual requirements and as-bid program
| requirements... which invites arbitrary requirements
| adjustment on behalf of the bidders, but that can be
| explained away as {insert semi-justified reason here}.
| behringer wrote:
| Yep that was my thought. This guy and his company fell for
| literal bribery.
| noirbot wrote:
| I don't think you're wrong, but I do want to push back
| against this sort of bribery being entirely illegitimate.
| There's absolutely something to be said for a company
| partner that cares enough to know how to bribe you and
| cares enough about your business.
|
| Even if the financial part is 100% bribery, there's a
| difference between "here's a check so you pick us instead
| of the competition" and spending the effort to work out
| what your company/decision makers care about and
| providing that.
|
| It's like saying if I plan a date with someone at a
| concert I know they're into that I'm bribing them into a
| relationship. In a literal sense, yes, but having someone
| care enough to cater to you isn't exactly meaningless in
| terms of deciding who to pursue a longer-term
| relationship with, personally or in business.
| mcculley wrote:
| My first professional job was working as a DoD contractor.
| Having the anti-bribery training beaten into me did not
| prepare me well for doing business with the private sector
| and in other countries. I had to learn that there are
| completely different rules and expectations.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| That's exactly it - It's not illegal to take bribes as an
| officer of a corporation; it's illegal to defraud others
| while doing so.
|
| If you take a personal bribe to tank your business,
| that's between you and your business partners - a civil
| matter unless your business partners are John Q public
| (Which is why the SEC exists). It is entirely legal to
| enrich yourself at the expense of a business you wholely
| own, with the obvious caveat that the courts will pierce
| the veil if you've committed crimes as that company.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, people assume that Microsoft just somehow "won" by
| default, but they were young and VERY hungry back then, and
| it showed.
| ohjeez wrote:
| If you want an in-depth examination of OS/2's history...
| https://medium.com/@estherschindler/os-2-is-25-years-old-201...
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Hey now! You're talking about me! (Not really). My first job
| out of college was as a temp for a marketing group in Boca
| Raton, FL where I had moved briefly to get away from New
| England weather. I was tasked to write "OS/2 Success Stories"
| which were used to create white papers and other marketing
| material. This was years before the OS/2 Warp release, which
| was, I agree, truly abysmally marketed (that logo!!). The only
| thing I can remember solidly was that Traveller's Insurance
| used OS/2 and I wrote glowing details of how happy they were
| with it. But other financial companies come to mind too. Chase
| maybe? Oh, and that installing OS/2 in the days before CD ROMs
| required a stack of easily 20 floppy disks or more... You'd pop
| them in, one after another, listening for a beep to tell you
| when to switch, for what seemed like hours.
|
| Even though it wasn't a technical job per se, I learned to
| create a little Lotus Notes database to help us keep track of
| the various companies and more importantly, got my own copies
| of the rare developer manuals which were only available to
| licensees of Notes. Between that small bit of knowledge and IBM
| on my resume (a _very_ big deal even in the early 90s), I was
| able to bald-face my way into getting a programming job and
| starting my career.
| pengaru wrote:
| More like Microsoft had a stranglehold on the consumer PC
| market already with MS-DOS and everything was so
| broken/incompatible at the time it was practically a foregone
| conclusion whatever GUI MS shipped in subsequent versions of
| MS-DOS would own the PC market.
|
| OS/2 only made it worse for IBM by shipping DOS+Windows
| compatibility, so basically zero developers wrote OS/2-native
| applications. This gave Microsoft nothing but time to get their
| Windows stability and multitasking performance up to snuff with
| NT.
|
| In hindsight I feel like the dismal PC situation in terms of
| constant crashes/need for reboots in pre protected-mode MS-DOS
| and combinatorial explosion of incompatibilities created by all
| the random ass hardware peripherals conditioned everyone to
| fear more change and diversity. If the software being shipped
| on the computers at the time couldn't make things work well,
| and these were allegedly _the_ experts most qualified to do it
| right, what will things be like with some alternative software
| attempting to emulate the same stuff in a "compatible" way? No
| way, OS/2 was doomed. And I'm saying this as someone who ran
| OS/2 WARP for years before discovering an Infomagic 4-CD Linux
| set in my teens.
| bink wrote:
| Back then the OS that shipped with the PC determined what 99%
| of people would run (much like today). Microsoft used their
| burgeoning monopoly to make sure that no one shipped a non-
| Microsoft OS with any PC. OS/2 was so much better than
| anything that shipped with any PC I bought at the time, but I
| remember the cost being prohibitive for a student.
| tzs wrote:
| > OS/2 only made it worse for IBM by shipping DOS+Windows
| compatibility, so basically zero developers wrote OS/2-native
| applications.
|
| Practically zero developers wrote for OS/2 because IBM made
| it hard to do so. I remember something Jerry Pournelle wrote
| about his experience at a major trade show (COMDEX?) that IBM
| and Microsoft both attended, after Warp was out and I think
| when Windows 95 was still in beta.
|
| At the IBM booth he told them he'd like to do some OS/2
| development and asked how to get started. They gave him a
| form to fill out to apply for their developer program. They
| wanted details on what he wanted to develop, his business
| plan, and stuff like that. If that was all acceptable to IBM
| then they would let him to buy their expensive SDK.
|
| Then he went to the Microsoft booth and said he'd like to
| develop for Windows 95. They handed him a CD-ROM with the
| SDK, tools, and documentation.
|
| Later, after Windows 95 was released I remember going to a
| retail software store (Egghead) and in the developer software
| section there was nothing at all from IBM. Microsoft on the
| other had everything one needed to start development there.
| Watcom C/C++ was also there, which supported DOS, Windows,
| OS/2, Netware, and major DOS extenders, so at least you could
| get some OS/2 developer tools at retail.
|
| And if you did go through all the hoops and develop something
| for OS/2, IBM didn't seem to care. Apple and Microsoft were
| always on the lookout for 3rd party programs that could
| promote their platforms and would run ad campaigns featuring
| them. They'd pay stores to put such software in better
| locations.
|
| (That same not bothering to market applied to the OS itself.
| The reason when when you walked into a major software store
| you would be greeted with a front of store Windows 95 display
| while OS/2 was on a bottom shelf somewhere in the back of the
| store most of the lights were burned out and the remaining
| ones were flickering in a way that made you nauseous is that
| the stores sell shelf space. Microsoft paid for premium
| space. IBM did not).
|
| They also did a terrible job of hardware support, particular
| video card support. I wanted to quad boot between Windows 95,
| Windows NT, OS/2 Warp, and Linux.
|
| I had to go through something like half a dozen or more cards
| video before I found one that worked well enough with OS/2 to
| support a decent resolution and frame rate. I had expected
| Linux to be the one to give me the most trouble, but it
| wasn't too bad.
|
| IBM should have had its own team of video driver developers
| writing drivers for all the common cards that didn't already
| have good OS/2 support from the card vendors.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| The first paying developer job I had was writing apps for
| O/S 2. But that software was for the US Navy. I think IBM
| thought they could secure the "real" use cases and let
| Microsoft have the mom, pop, buddy and sis market. Forward
| thinking was not IBMs strong suit.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| In retrospect, it seems like IBM (tech strategy) was
| always hamstrung by IBM (sales strategy).
|
| The latter being firmly in the "scale top-down" camp: big
| customers are the only customers that matter.
|
| I've worked for both top-down and bottom-up marketed
| companies, and the latter always seem to have better
| products.
|
| I think it's because (a) there are so few whale
| customers, which hyper-specializes your product to their
| needs instead of getting a representative sample of the
| actual market's needs, (b) you can do dumb shit like
| limit your documentation to only customers, (c) it gives
| you a convenient excuse to ignore customer input ("Oh,
| they're not a customer that matters"), & (d) it slows you
| down, because your customers' upgrade processes are
| glacially slow, which removes pressure for you to be
| fast.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Developer! Developers! Developers!
| https://youtu.be/Vhh_GeBPOhs
|
| One can say a lot about Microsoft and Windows, but they
| were always keen on building a platform which enabled
| others to build upon.
| jrockway wrote:
| I don't know if we can take this conclusion away. For
| example, Apple requires you to pay to be in the developer
| program and buy their hardware in order to make an iPhone
| app. They beat the crap out of Microsoft in mobile.
| Microsoft was also in the mobile game way before Apple.
| (Remember Windows CE? I had one of those right before the
| first iPhone and Android phone came out.)
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Many developers don't go through the steps to develop for
| Apple since they like ObjC or Xcode or the review
| process, but since that's where the users are. Apple
| created great products for users, where the walled garden
| reduces the risk of catching a bad app harming you.
|
| Microsoft on the other hand always tried to give
| developers tools and access to it with quite good
| documentation. Enabling people to build on top of their
| platform. Making sure that other people can built upon
| their platform. This brought Windows in a ton of embedded
| worlds except the phone, where they missed the
| reinvention by Apple. But from say ATMs to Trains Windows
| is still ubiquitous. And that's the way they built Azure.
| Want to offer your own Service? - You can integrate it
| into Azures Cloud Console. And at the same time they
| still foster developers, with GitHub, VisualStudioCode
| and TypeScript.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Apple beat the crap out of MS in mobile because they made
| the more technologically correct choice: that mobile
| ~2003 couldn't support desktop features and needed to be
| something fundamentally different (and resource-lighter).
|
| Microsoft was sucked into the false idea that people
| wanted desktops on their mobile devices, but hardware at
| the time couldn't offer that in a cost-effective way.
|
| Apple was also cutthroat pragmatic in a way that I don't
| think was ever in Microsoft's DNA -- specifically:
| killing Flash support.
| tengwar2 wrote:
| What was in the SDK? I'm just curious because I developed
| for OS/2 1.0, i.e. before the Great Schism, and before
| Presentation Manager was launched. The SDK was MS C v5.2,
| MASM, CodeView, some .lib files, and some seriously
| inaccurate documentation. There wasn't much there by modern
| standards - rather less than you would get for Petzold era
| Windows development.
| chasil wrote:
| OS/2 was forced down to 80286 compatibility for version 1.1.
|
| That was major design damage, required by IBM because most of
| the PS/2 line was on this CPU.
|
| Both Linux and NT required an 80386 with a flat memory model.
| On capable hardware, this was far superior.
|
| Both Linux and NT quickly ran on multiple platforms besides
| x86. I think that OS/2 was ported to Power, but nothing else.
| tengwar2 wrote:
| No, that was v1.0. v1.1 was incompatible with v1.1 in some
| respects for that reason. I had some stuff that was literally
| hard-wired with wire-wrap to do bit-shuffling from an image
| acquisition system (assembly wasn't fast enough) and I would
| have had to re-wire it to migrate to 1.1. There were also
| some details that wouldn't have affected most people, like
| moving from 8 byte entries to 16 byte entries in the
| descriptor tables. Sorry if I'm vague on the details - it was
| a while back.
| chasil wrote:
| Interesting, the wiki is not clear on this.
|
| "OS/2 1.x targets the Intel 80286 processor and DOS
| fundamentally doesn't. IBM insisted on supporting the 80286
| processor, with its 16-bit segmented memory mode, because
| of commitments made to customers who had purchased many
| 80286-based PS/2s as a result of IBM's promises surrounding
| OS/2. Until release 2.0 in April 1992, OS/2 ran in 16-bit
| protected mode and therefore could not benefit from the
| Intel 80386's much simpler 32-bit flat memory model and
| virtual 8086 mode features."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
|
| The developer of busybox/toybox also had 80286 discussion.
|
| https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/os2/OS2Warp.html
| markhahn wrote:
| I remember 386 support connected with 1.3, but probably still
| using descriptors.
|
| NSFT was still involved at 2.0 time, though DOS+Windows was
| pretty obviously going to win, so to speak, and NT OS/2 was
| still hush-hush. NT OS/2 ran on ia32, mips, alpha, and i860
| (wow, freaky to remember that!) at the time - the "new
| technology" was as much the racy idea of portable OS code as
| RISC and microkernels...
| chasil wrote:
| Cutler's design was VMS written in (portable) C. (The VMS
| kernel was written in assembler.)
|
| VMS has great strengths, but hard file locks on OS
| components require downtime for patching. Cutler didn't
| foresee the avalanche of updates, and the availability
| collapse of "patch Tuesday."
|
| POSIX opportunistic locking was a great gift to his
| competition.
| dflock wrote:
| OS/2. Also used for Vancouver's SkyTrain system, afaik.
| dtx1 wrote:
| > The Forgotten Operating System That Keeps the NYC Subway System
| Alive
|
| It's OS/2. Hardly forgotten.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Give it a few more years. The iconic icon of a Floppy Disk has
| almost faded out of existance.
| manv1 wrote:
| OS/2 was known to be rock-solid back in the day. It was the OS of
| choice for a lot of financials. Everyone moved to Windows NT when
| 4 came out, though, because of the way Microsoft did licensing.
| not2b wrote:
| "hilariously robust", the article says.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| How is it possible that the magnetic stripe encoding is a secret?
| Surely you can just run the card through a reader before and
| after taking some journeys and reverse engineer from there? Is
| the balance actually stored on the card, or is it just basically
| a primary key in a database somewhere that gets queried on each
| ride?
| walrus01 wrote:
| they're in the process of replacing the whole magnetic stripe
| system right now with a modern contactless system similar to
| london, vancouver, seattle, etc.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's both, and you can find the answer on Wikipedia. [1]
|
| > During a swipe, the MetroCard is read, re-written to, then
| check-read to verify correct encoding... Each MetroCard stored
| value card is assigned a unique, permanent ten-digit serial
| number when it is manufactured. The value is stored
| magnetically on the card itself, while the card's transaction
| history is held centrally in the Automated Fare Collection
| (AFC) Database... Whenever the card is swiped at a turnstile,
| the value of the card is read, the new value is written, the
| customer is let through, and then the central database is
| updated with the new transaction as soon as possible. Cards are
| not validated in real time against the database when swiped to
| pay the fare.
|
| There's also an old NYT article [2]:
|
| > But since the main computer communicates regularly with both
| the turnstiles and the booth computers, false cards have so far
| all been invalidated after they have been used once... Some
| hackers believe that because the turnstiles, the token booth
| computers and the mainframe computer, respectively, upload and
| download information at six-minute intervals, the length of
| time that a passenger can transfer without paying may actually
| be 18 minutes more than the advertised two hours, if the timing
| is right... ''I believe that, fundamentally, a system as
| complicated as the Metrocard cannot be absolutely secure,'' he
| said. ''What we have to make sure is that the hack won't scale.
| If a few people ride for free, that's no big deal.''
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetroCard#Technology
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/11/nyregion/what-galls-a-
| hac...
| ardel95 wrote:
| That's the thing with fraud. The goal is never to stop it
| all, but to keep it at some local minimum. The rest is just
| the cost of doing business.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Capitol One has been touting "With Capitol One, you're
| never responsible for fraudulent charges on your account!"
|
| Yeah, no shit. Fraud is YOUR problem. Not mine.
| roywiggins wrote:
| In this case it just has to be harder to pull off than
| jumping the turnstile.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Which is unfathomably easy, so much so that it doesn't
| even require physically jumping
| crazygringo wrote:
| Cops were actually catching and fining people a ton for
| this between about 2-4 months ago. First time I'd ever
| seen them proactively enforce it.
|
| Haven't seen it in a few weeks though. It's expensive to
| be posting two cops near every turnstile entrance.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Pretty neat to keep value on the card.
|
| EMV (chip) bank cards can default to local authorization mode
| if the transaction value fits your profile if the pinpad
| can't communicate upstream.
|
| Nothing worse than folks not able to buy/use your system
| because it is "offline".
| lupire wrote:
| This is why swiping (read-write-read) MetroCard is much less
| reliable than swiping a (read-only) credit card transaction,
| and why you need to swipe a MetroCard slowly.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Surely you can just run the card through a reader before and
| after taking some journeys and reverse engineer from there?
|
| I doubt they do this, but if the data's encrypted with a good
| cipher used correctly, all you'll be able to detect is that
| it's changed.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| Chinas railway is running on flash player [0]. At least that
| choice doesn't limit it to one specific OS.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786670
| Meph504 wrote:
| You would be shocked at the number of ATM machines that run on
| OS/2, and though I don't advocate it, it makes sense in a way.
|
| When is the last exploit you saw published for OS/2, many of the
| old OS/2 machines direct dial into an old modem bank (at a bank.)
|
| The thread window on these is tiny because of how far behind they
| are.
| jackblemming wrote:
| How did this scale without kubernetes, docker, and microservices?
| How does this work without transpiling from TypeScript to another
| language? This wont scale without type safety!! Does it even have
| a JIRA backlog and dedicated product manager? No wonder this
| system is so mediocre. It probably wasnt even made following
| Agile guidelines!
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The NY metro is infamously unable to scale, in large part
| because of extraordinary tech debt! The cost of each new line
| is stratospheric! They use century-old manual track routing
| cables!
|
| You might think this is a clever take but it's really not far
| from the truth. They NEED a revamp on a modern tech stack so
| they can use the trains, electronics, and technology trains in
| the rest of the world run on.
| woodruffw wrote:
| The subway's issues are mostly physical, not in software: the
| city (really, the state) contracts virtually everything
| around fare collection out to Cubic, and they do an okay
| enough job. See for example the OMNY card, which rolled out
| surprisingly fast.
|
| In other words: the things that are currently falling apart
| (the physical relays, for example) are almost completely
| disconnected from fare collection (which is what the
| article's about). The latter runs pretty well; replacing it
| with a modern tech stack rather than the current incremental
| approach wouldn't have many benefits.
| bontaq wrote:
| A modern tech stack won't help that much, there are other
| issues.
|
| > Most subway services cannot significantly increase their
| frequencies during rush hours, except for the 1, G, J/Z, L,
| and M trains (the L service already is automated with CBTC).
|
| > However, even without CBTC, the system is currently
| retrofitted to operate at frequencies of up to 60 trains per
| hour (tph) on the IND Queens Boulevard Line (30 tph on each
| of the local and express pairs of tracks made possible by the
| Jamaica-179th Street terminal, which has four sidings past
| the terminal for each set of tracks) and 33 tph on the IRT
| Flushing Line.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_of_the_New_York_City.
| ..
| devwastaken wrote:
| In 20 years all current software stacks will be legacy and
| equally if not more unusable. We rely significantly more now
| on tooling to just "do it for us". That tooling relies
| heavily on the OS it runs on and makes assumptions.
| chinabot wrote:
| If you diddnt do updates I seriously doubt the stack would
| survive 2 years. The joys of modern interconnected systems
| nickbauman wrote:
| I believe your comment might be a bit too broad for the
| claims you're making.
|
| Arguably, the most advanced "tech stack" for moving trains
| around rail systems today (at scale, with the highest safety
| rating) is based around the Sicas ECC electronic interlocking
| by Siemens.
|
| However, this article is merely about the technology used for
| collection of fares for the NYC metro rail system.
| supernova87a wrote:
| If you want a story into the other "operating system" that keeps
| the NYC subway system running (or from another point of view,
| never advancing), see this:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-d...
|
| "Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks"
|
| and how it's actually very about how managing a software/IT
| project can go wrong.
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