All the metro trains in this big city continue to run every morning using floppy disks since 1998. The modernization of the system is not happening right away and the city fears the worst.
When you get on a subway, whether automated or not, you don’t think about all the infrastructure and complexity of the system that makes it work. Spontaneously, you surely imagine computers connected to a central network with a whole bunch of specialized software working in concert to organize the circulation of trains without incident, all monitored by several people. This is almost the case, except that sometimes the reality is much more surprising.
There is in fact a metro which is based on theusing 3 floppy disks. Yes, the ones we used on our PCs before the arrival of the CD-ROM. Did you think they were gone? Make no mistake: the American army was still using it to guide its nuclear missiles in 2016. Even Japan, a country at the forefront of technology, waited until 2024 to get rid of it definitively. And here, this city’s metro has been using it every day for 26 years.
In this big city, the metro trains run using a floppy disk
In the American city of San Francisco, the teams in charge of the metro have a daily ritual: they insert floppy disks containing a key transport network program. “The system that automatically controls our trains inside the metro“, specifies Mariana Maguire of the train control project at the SFMTA (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency). “It’s like you lose your memory every night and every morning someone has to tell you “this is who you are, what your purpose is, and what you need to do today.”“.
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Since theadoption of floppy disks in 1998the San Francisco metro continues to use them despite their estimated lifespan of 25 years maximum. Jeffrey Tumlin, its director, is nevertheless aware of the risks: “Currently the system is working well, but we know that with each passing year the risk of deterioration of the data on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure“. A statement which does not reassure, especially since modernization is not imminent. She should take at least 10 years And cost hundreds of millions of dollars according to Tumlin.
Source: ABC7 News