On October 15, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) entered into a $212 million contract with Hitachi Rail to get its Muni Metro light rail control system off of floppy disks and an additional $488 million (for a total of $700 million) will go to other key maintenance tasks like replacing the slow, fragile, aged loop cables [h/t Ars Technica].
This isn't the only example in recent memory of a government finally doing away with floppy disks. This past year, we've also covered efforts in Germany and Japan to leave floppy disks behind. We've even covered the SFMTA's prior troubles getting floppies replaced among concerns of "catastrophic failure" potential. In that story, we quoted an SFMTA executive on ABC7 explaining that running rail services was introduced "in an era when computers didn't have hard drives." It's also worth noting that the SFMTA control system uses bulkier 5.25-inch floppy drives, not standard 3.5-inch floppies or larger 8-inch floppies.
