If I asked you to name a piece of consumer technology from 1971 that is still being actively used to control critical infrastructure in 2026, you would probably guess something like the original IBM mainframe or maybe the C programming language. You almost certainly would not guess a magnetic disk in a plastic envelope. But here we are.
The floppy disk, invented at IBM in 1971, popularized in the 1980s, and allegedly killed off by Apple in 1998, is still working. Not in retro computing forums. In real production systems, today, in 2026.
The places floppy disks have refused to leave
Japan officially eliminated floppy disks from its government processes in 2024 after a multi-year campaign by digital reform minister Taro Kono, a campaign that involved publicly waging "war" on the format. Until then, citizens were genuinely required to submit some forms on physical 3.5-inch floppy disks. Reuters covered the moment Kono declared victory, which involved scrubbing the requirement from over a thousand separate regulations.
The San Francisco Muni Metro still uses floppy disks to load its Automatic Train Control System, the system that runs trains through the underground portion of the Market Street tunnel. Every morning, the system boots from floppies. Replacing it has been on the to-do list since at least 2018, and as of last year, it was still running. The replacement project is underway but has been pushed to 2030.
Boeing 747-400s used floppy disks to load avionics navigation databases until very recently. The aircraft is being phased out, but plenty are still flying cargo runs. The disks were swapped out roughly every 28 days as new navigation data became available. Imagine being the IT person who has to physically walk a stack of 3.5-inch floppies onto a 747 in 2026.
And then there is the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The Air Force ran the Strategic Automated Command and Control System on 8-inch floppy disks until 2019, when the system was finally upgraded to a solid-state digital alternative. The Pentagon defended the floppies for years on the grounds that they were not networked and therefore could not be hacked from the outside. Which, to be fair, is true.
Why the format outlasted everything that was supposed to replace it
The argument for keeping floppies in critical infrastructure is not really about the disks. It is about the systems they plug into. A train control system that has worked reliably since 1998 is not something you rip out because the disk format is dated. The whole machine is dated. The control logic, the interlocks, the relays, the certifications, all of it was tested and approved as a unit. Replacing the floppy drive means replacing or recertifying everything downstream of it.
That is the actual reason floppies are still around. They got embedded in systems that are too expensive, too risky, or too regulated to update. The disk is the visible weird thing, but the disk is not the problem. The problem is the embedded industrial computing stack from 1995 that the disk is feeding.
There is also a security argument that some of these operators genuinely make. A floppy disk is air-gapped by default. There is no remote attack surface. You cannot phish someone into uploading malware to a floppy from the other side of the world. You have to physically walk in and put the disk in the drive. For some people running some systems, that has been a feature, not a bug.
The actual technology was clever
It is easy to dismiss the floppy as primitive, but the engineering was sharp for what it was. A 3.5-inch double-density disk holds 1.44 MB on a magnetic surface that can survive being shoved in a backpack, dropped on the floor, and exposed to ambient room temperatures and light moisture. That is more than you can say for a lot of modern flash media. The hard plastic shell, the spring-loaded metal shutter, the write-protect tab. All of these were clever solutions to real problems.
The 5.25-inch format that came before it, with the soft sleeve and exposed magnetic surface, was more fragile. People still remember the sound of stepping on one accidentally, or the sinking feeling of pulling one out of an envelope and finding the surface fingerprinted.
And the original 8-inch floppies, the ones in the nuclear command system until 2019, look almost comical now. Roughly the size of a vinyl record, holding maybe a megabyte if you were lucky. But for what they did, they did it well, for a long, long time.
What is finally replacing them
The actual end of the floppy is not happening because the disks themselves are wearing out, although they are. Sony stopped manufacturing 3.5-inch floppies in 2011, and existing stockpiles have been working through their second and third decades. The disks are still findable on eBay and from a small number of specialty distributors who buy up old inventory.
What is killing the floppy is the slow, expensive replacement of the systems they were embedded in. SF Muni is moving to a modern train control system. Japan upgraded their forms. The Air Force replaced SACCS. The 747s are getting retired regardless of the floppy issue. Each of these is a multi-year, multi-million-dollar project, and each one removes another reason to keep manufacturing the disks.
By the end of this decade, floppies will be genuinely gone from production use almost everywhere. Not because anyone in 2026 thinks they are a great idea, but because the systems that needed them have aged out. The disks themselves were never the problem. They were just the most visible relic of a much deeper story about how slowly critical infrastructure actually changes.
If you have an old floppy lying around in a drawer somewhere, it is probably still readable. That is the real surprise. A 30-year-old magnetic medium that you stored in a shoebox can still hold its data. There are USB sticks from five years ago that have already failed. The floppy disk, for all its limitations, was built to last. It just outlasted the things that were supposed to come after it.
