San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks

[Porthos]

San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's director of transportation Jeffrey Tumlin told ABC that the city's automatic light-rail control system is running on outdated tech and "relies on three five-inch floppy disks" to boot up. The reporter was holding a 3.5-inch disk in the broadcast, so may have just skipped the word "point".

"It's a question of risk," Tumlin explained in a three-minute segment about the floppy replacement project. "The system is currently working just fine, but we know that with each increasing year the risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure."

The agency noted that its system was installed in 1998, when floppies were still in common use and, er, "computers didn't have hard drives." That doesn't exactly match reality, since hard drives were already very common at the time – here's a tale from 1998 about drives sold at the time, in sizes ranging from 5GB to 16.8GB. That's right: gigabytes! How would anyone ever fill one of those up?

And before folks start panicking, it's worth remembering that use of floppy disks is not uncommon in embedded systems. Bear in mind that the US nuclear arsenal ran off eight-inch floppies until 2019. It's the way stuff was done when these systems were built last century

San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks

What is it with Fog City and ancient transport tech?

www.theregister.com

 

[Philippe]

the risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases

Well, just make copies then!

 

[phaZed]

Someone in California finally found Amazon, lol! Such an easy fix, amazing it's taking so long.

 

[Markverhyden]

The focus on floppy disks is just to use it as a place holder indicative of how old everything is. While 1998 had PII processors and W98 industrial controls were still far behind. I wouldn't be surprised if they were using 386's with SCO.

 

[frase]

I have one of those Gotek for my Amiga500!

 

[Philippe]

I have one of those Gotek for my Amiga500!

I have one (720Kb version) for my IBM 5150