So in that sense I find the reference to be useful, and not clickbait.

https://www.sfmta.com/muni-transit

Though, I still have ~$8 Clipper credit on my phone that I may or may not ever use...

They also support Apple’s Transit card (Clipper card in your Apple Wallet) so it works by tapping your phone, without unlocking it. It should also work with your iPhone turned off (newer models I think iPhone 14+ only)

It's not worth the money to the suppliers to go through the trouble of managing the upgrade of that one system alone; likely there's an opportunity cost where they have limited resources and they want to focus on the bigger projects making bigger impacts and bigger sales.

The last building I lived in, the sliding balcony doors were all starting to wear out. Building management called the company that made the doors to ask them about repairs or replacement and were told that the cost of replacing the doors for people isn't worth their time; basically, why would they come fix our old balcony doors for $x when they could spend their time on building and installing new balcony doors on a new build for $xx?

I can think of a couple of things at play

The system was likely designed a long time before 1998, because of how this type of contract works

Even in 1998 USB was very new, so thumb drives weren't an option

CDs were ubiquitous, but cd writers were not

Proprietary tech was available, Zip and Jazz drives come to mind, or maybe even minidisc in that timeframe, but any would have been a poor choice in hindsight

Tape would presumably have been considered, but was already notorious for long term compatibility (in 99 I had to restore from a tape backup that was only a couple of years old and we couldn't easily find compatible hardware)

There were other proprietary optical storage media in the market, but they were expensive and aimed at the long term storage market (heaven help you if that's how your archives are stored)

If they needed a cheap, easily written, and distributable media, they didn't have a lot of good choices.

We still don't have a good choice for this if you want your system air gapped. I sure as hell wouldn't let anyone plug a USB device into a safety critical system

https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/20/floppy_disk_business/...

You can get a 10 pack for 15 bucks.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulato...

Still just as slow, but no read/write failures.

Not sure if there’s an actual disk doohickey that plugs into any drive, but probably.

https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-s...

Yeah, but stuff like train signalling systems don't get a full overhaul every year. The system in question was probably designed a decade earlier, and just evolved bit by bit.

But it's definitely funny in context. For reference, in the same timeframe Paris was constructing its first fully automatic (no driver) metro line, after the successes in Lyon, Toulouse, Lille a decade prior. Toulouse and Lille have fully automated metros.

You need redundancy, upgraded communications paths, you need it to handle interference, you need it to work above and below ground, you need it to be secured.

The 20-year service plan needs to include replacing hardware that fails (instead of just saying "sorry we don't make that anymore"); it needs to include security updates, expansions, it needs to include monitoring, it needs to include people knowing how the system works and what it does for 20 years (and not just having people retire and taking knowledge with them).

It includes training, it includes escalation and SLAs, it includes the software (which will likely need to be customized for SF MUNI's specific needs), bug fixes, hardware support. It needs to support whatever OS they're running 18 years from now instead of just saying "Run Windows 10 on your clients until 2034 when it's 20 years old and you have to pay Microsoft for extended support".

It boggles the mind that people on HN of all places look at short-form newspaper articles summarizing complex systems they don't understand and then post the most uninformed, reductionist armchair takes imaginable.