“Yes, it runs on DOS loaded from 5¼-inch floppy disks, but it’s still serviceable,” he said.
Mariana Maguire, public relations officer for the Train Control Upgrade Project, told ABC7 last week that upgrading would let the ATCS “track the movements of trains and the operations of trains throughout the city much more easily with the assistance of autopilot, which will be able to boost the human element as well.”
However, budget challenges put the project’s timeline into question. The SFMTA’s train upgrade project isn’t just a migration off of floppy disks but also a “complete overhaul of the current train control system and all its components, including the onboard computers, central and local servers, and communications infrastructure,” Roccaforte said.
Much more critical than the dated use of floppy disks is the system’s loop cable, which transmits data between the central servers and the trains and, according to Roccaforte, “has less bandwidth than an old AOL dial-up modem.”
The SFMTA’s website adds:
The loop cable is fragile and easily disturbed. This makes subway maintenance more difficult. This also means the system cannot be extended outside the subway, along surface rail, where currently we don’t have automatic train control.
The SFMTA is looking to upgrade to “modern technologies, such as fiber optic or Wi-Fi,” Roccaforte said.
The SFMTA hopes that “a large component” of the required funds for upgrading the ATCS “will come from state and federal grants,” but “the rest of it will come from Muni’s rapidly declining internal capital resources,” Tumlin said. The SFMTA declined to comment to Ars on how much it has spent so far on updating the system.
The SFMTA still has years of relying on old floppies. In the meantime, it’s in the company other entities relying on the disk storage, including cargo airlines and people doing custom embroidery.
Correction: This article previously incorrectly stated that the SFMTA was the first US agency to adopt floppy disks. The SFMTA was not the first US agency to use flooppy disks, but rather the first US agency to adopt the ATCS. We regret the error.