(FOX BUSINESS) – San Francisco may be in Silicon Valley, but part of its rail system is still running on technology that hasn’t been on the cutting edge since the Reagan administration. Officials from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) told KGO-TV in a recent interview that 5.25-inch floppy disks are still used to operate the city’s train control system.
SFMTA, which operates San Francisco’s Muni Metro light rail system, has been using floppy disks to run the trains since 1998.
“We were the first agency in the U.S. to adopt this particular technology, but it was from an era that computers didn’t have a hard drive, so you have to load the software from floppy disks on to the computer,” Mariana Maguire of the SFMTA Train Control Project told KGO.
