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Dual Urban Time Bombs
by Andrew McCaskey
There are two types of urban time bombs that were bought to the foreground by the story this week from the Washington DC area – when a single failure in a 1970’s vintage computer system took out 750 traffic lights and, for at least two days, threw the lights of Montgomery Country Maryland into un-synchronized chaos.
First, it’s hard to imagine that there was a conscious design choice made that put that into a single point of failure mode. Probably the system had been extended, patched and add-on over the years so that it would have been almost impossible not to have this incident some day. There have got to be a number of similar embedded systems throughout the country with exactly the same set of potential issues and failure potential. The second problem more easily overlooked is the fact that those who designed, installed and maintained those systems are either gone or headed out the door, as retirements. Even a young engineer of the 1970’s is headed into retirement or a second career – and has little or no interest in going back to the days of relays, ladder logic and dedicated controllers. Unlike COBOL skills, there are not too many places to keep those sorts of electrical, mechanical and discrete logic skills alive. That’s the second time bomb. Ticking away even faster than the first. After all, the hardware was pretty solid. Must have had some good designers.
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