In San Francisco, the cradle of Silicon Valley, we have not yet said goodbye to floppy disks. The local transport authority’s rail system still uses this technology from another era.
When you walk around the magnificent – but so uneven – city of San Francisco, you may have fun thinking that the giants Google, Apple, Meta, Netflix or Salesforce are based there, or just a few dozen kilometers away. at most. If the Californian city is the symbol of Silicon Valley, and therefore of technology, you will be all the more surprised to learn that the SFMTA, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agencyremained stuck in the days of the floppy disk for its train control system.
San Francisco’s trains and subways have been running on floppy disks for 26 years!
For its subways and trains, the city of San Francisco relies on humans, but also on… 5.25 inch floppy disks, or 5 and a quarter inches, as they are also called. The finest connoisseurs of technology from the previous century should not laugh at this, because they know to what extent the 5.25-inch floppy disk was a success, popularized in particular by Steve Wozniack’s Apple II at the end of the 70s, then by the PC at the start of the following decade.
For the record, it was in 1998 that the SFMTA installed its automatic train control system. At the time, it was designed to last 20, maybe 25 years at most. It has now been 26 years since he was tested, a happy anniversary.
The head of the transport authority of The City by the Bay (the nickname of the city), Jeffrey Tumlin, explained in early February in the American media that the train control system in the Market Street metro is loaded from readers 5.25 inch floppy disks. In other words, every day, SFMTA staff must load instructions onto floppy disks to keep the trains running smoothly. For the record, Market Street is this immense artery which starts from the Castro district and joins the Financial District and the famous Ferry Building, flirting with certain more “tense” streets of the Tenderloin and Union Square districts.
The outdated system will be replaced, but it will take a decade
Even though we are very nostalgic for the unbreakable (or almost) floppy disk, we must recognize that the technology used for San Francisco’s subways and trains is rather obsolete. But this is almost nothing compared to the risk faced by the SFMTA, because any outage can have repercussions on a large number of people.
The transport company has launched a massive upgrade project to modernize the rail system, permanently replacing floppy disks with a wireless system. The transition also promises to be perilous. It could, according to the director of the SFMTA, take around ten years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Once the upgrade is complete, agents working from the SFMTA control room will be able to more easily monitor the movements and operations of trains and subways, thanks to the assistance of the autopilot.
Source : ABC7 News
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