The San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Authority uses extremely outdated technology for critical
“Our subway train control system is loaded with floppy disks,” subway director Geoffrey Tamlin said this week.
Metro spokesman Steven Cheung acknowledged that the automatic train control system uses outdated equipment.
“We understand that any failure of an obsoleteequipment will certainly affect everyone who works on or rides the subway,” Chun told The Standard. “Fortunately, our team makes backups between these failures, bringing the system out of action for weeks or just a few hours.”
The use of floppy disks is hardly anya previously unknown fact; To begin with, Tamlin had said bluntly that his agency should retain employees with skills honed to the equivalent of ancient Babylonian programming.
But Twitter users on Thursday expressedsurprising that a city known as the global technology capital is so dependent on a storage format that lacks the space to store a single high-resolution photo.
However, the San Francisco subway is hardly unique in its use of floppy disks. Back in 2020, British Airways was loading avionics software onto Boeing 747s via floppy disks.
Technology has certainly improved since the 80s:The processing power of the iPhone is 100,000 times greater than the processing power of the machines NASA used to send men to the moon, not to mention the drives that many people over 40 remember from when they inserted them into the "A" drive of their computers . For those who have never used such media, it should be noted that floppy disks should be kept away from any magnets - otherwise all information will be lost.
Initially, the diameter of the floppy was as much as eightinches when introduced in the 1970s, later reduced to five and a quarter inches, and eventually to three. Eventually CD-ROM technology supplanted them before it too almost disappeared.
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