San Francisco (USA) trains still depend on floppy disks to operate

April 8 (Portaltic/EP) –

The diskettes They still have an important role in the management of the train system of the city of San Francisco (United States), although those responsible intend to update it to a more current one before a failure occurs in transportation management.

The system that automatically controls suburban trains It depends on floppy disks to operate. It currently works well, but the Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) plans to update it, as director Jeffrey Tumlin said in a interview with ABC7.

This agenda was the first in the United States to implement the system that is still in operation for automatic train control, in 1998. At that time, it was the most advanced technology at a time when computers still did not have a hard drive, as noted Mariana Maguire, from the Train Control Project.

The idea was that will last about 20 or 25 yearsand even today there are operators who use five-inch floppy disks to tell the trains what to do every morning.

This system, however, exposes you to data degradation, which can lead to failures. For this reason, they are already thinking about updating the system, but replacing the current one with a more modern one will take at least another decade.

“This is indeed a multi-phase, decade-long project which starts with pieces from the Market Street subway and pieces on the surface. Ultimately, our goal is to have a single train control system for the entire rail system,” said Tumlin.

AN OBSOLETE SYSTEM THAT RESISTS TO DISAPPEAR

Floppy disks, those square-shaped data storage devices, have long been out of use, replaced by other formats, such as computer hard drives, CDs, pen drives or even the cloud..

However, they have remained in administrations such as the Japanese one, where at the beginning of the year the Government modified the law that obliged companies and citizens to present official documents into physical digital formats such as floppy disks or CD-ROMs so that they could use other online media.

In 2018, the United States nuclear missile system stopped using 8-inch floppy disks to give the launch orderand instead use solid-state digital storage drives.

Three years earlier, it is assumed that doctors in the Norwegian National Health System still received a diskette once a month to update your patient data, although they also had the option of accessing an 'online' database.