UNEXPECTEDLY: San Francisco’s Train System is Still Running on Floppy Disks.
In 1998, San Francisco installed the latest cutting-edge technology to run the train network: floppy disks. A quarter of a century later and the city’s transportation agency is still using the same system.
People under the age of 30 might not know what a floppy disk is; an archaic way of storing data (think USB stick). But the workers at San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) sure do as they are still using obsolete tech to automate the movement of light rail vehicles.
“We were the first agency in the U.S. to adopt this particular technology but it was from an era when computers didn’t have a hard drive so you have to load the software from floppy disks onto the computer,” Mariana Maguire, SFMTA Train Control Project, tells ABC 7.
“It’s like if you lose your memory overnight, and every morning, somebody has to tell you hey ‘this is who you are and what your purpose is what you have to do today,’” adds Maguire.
The SMFTA uses five-inch floppy disks to automatically control trains inside the subway. “With each increasing year risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure,” says SMFTA director Jeffrey Tumlin.
Flashback: “Shades of the New Yorker cover from 2013, which showed Obama with Gordon Gekko’s brick-sized cell phone and Kathleen Sebelius crossing her fingers while Jay Carney nervously inserted a five-inch floppy disk into the TRS-80-era Obamacare server. Not to mention the speeches that Newt Gingrich was giving during the heady Contract With America days of 1994 and 1995, when he would hold up in one hand a vacuum tube, and in the other a microchip. As he explained, vacuum tubes were still in use in some FAA-regulated Air Traffic Control towers in America.” As I wrote back in 2019 responding to a Bloomberg News article that exclaimed:
San Francisco rarely conjures images of creaky, decades-old technology, but that’s what’s running a key swath of its government, as well as those of cities across the U.S.
“Now who’s being naive, Kay? When I lived in Silicon Valley, the numerous power outages were a reminder that the businesses trying to bring you the 21st century were reliant upon a power grid that, thanks to the NIMBY nature of Bay Area leftists, hadn’t been upgraded since the 1960s heyday of Pat Brown, Jerry’s dad.