The sound of a crunching floppy disk drive may well be the soundtrack to a large part of my misspent youth. Please insert disk four of five. Oh you've lost it? No games for you, little Andy. No games for you.
Grand. Anyways, to the SFMTA's credit, it's been highlighting exactly why a floppy disk-based train control system is a bad idea in this modern day and age, which seems rather obvious but let's go there anyway. As Jeffery Tumlin, the director of transportation for the agency rather succinctly puts it:
And when it comes to train incidents, the term"catastrophic failure" really is enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. The system first came into usage in 1998 and was expected to last 20 to 25 years, meaning that it passed the upper margin of that time frame last year.
In the meantime, the humble floppy continues to survive in the most unlikely of places, and in this case, seems to be clinging on to relevance for another few years at least. Some tech just refuses to die, and for that alone, I salute you, floppies. Now, where did I put that last Frogger diskette?