San Francisco’s Market Street Metro runs on Reagan-era floppy disks

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San Francisco already knew that its transit agency was resorting to plastic beer cups to stop leaks in the Central Metro tunnel before it officially opened. It now appears that the San Francisco Public Transportation Authority is using extremely outdated technology for critical operations: 5-inch floppy disks.

“Our train control system on the Market Street subway is loaded with five and a quarter inch floppy disks.” SFMTA director Geoffrey Tamlin told Priya to KQED’s David Clemens this week.

In other words, part of the frustration we feel when N-Judah wreaks havoc on our commute may have to do with the technology that was popularized by IBM during the Reagan administration.

Perhaps more ominously—or as a subtle call for more federal funds—Tumlin compared the situation to the recent collapse of Southwest Airlines.

SFMTA spokesman Steven Cheung, upon receiving the comment, acknowledged that the automatic train control system uses outdated equipment.

“We understand that any failure of legacy equipment is bound to impact everyone who works with or rides Muni,” Chun told The Standard. “Fortunately, our team makes the difference between these failures taking the system down for weeks or just a few hours.”

The use of floppy disks is hardly a previously unknown fact; To start, Tumlin told KQED bluntly that his agency should retain employees with skills honed to the equivalent of ancient Babylonian programming.

But Twitter users on Thursday expressed surprise that the city, known as the global tech capital, is so dependent on the storage format that it doesn’t have enough space to store a single high-resolution photo.

However, SFMTA is hardly unique in their use. Back in 2020, British Airways loaded avionics software onto 747s via floppy disk.

Technology has certainly improved since the 80s: the processing power of the iPhone is 100,000 times the processing power of the machines NASA used to send people to the moon, not to mention the disks that many people over 40 remember by inserting them into a drive. “A” of their computers. Gate 2000.

For those who have never had to use them – and keep them away from any magnets – floppy disks are still used as a “save” icon on computers around the world, but they’ve been out of date for 30 years or more. Floppy disks were originally eight inches in diameter when they were introduced in the 1970s, later reduced to five and a quarter inches, and eventually three. Early generations were indeed flexible, although the latest generation was made of harder, thicker plastic and didn’t flex at all. Eventually CD-ROM technology supplanted them before it too almost disappeared.

This story has been updated to include commentary from the SFMTA.

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