Some trains and government offices still run on floppy disks, the flat plastic storage squares from the 1980s that hold barely any data. In 2026. Not in a museum. In real systems that move people around a major city.
A floppy disk is a thin magnetic sheet sealed in a plastic shell. The most common one held about 1.44 megabytes, which is less than a single phone photo today. IBM built the first floppy in 1971, the format took over offices in the 1980s, and Apple helped kill it off for everyday users by 1998. Somehow it never fully left.
Where floppies hung on
Japan only got rid of them in government work in 2024. For years, citizens there had to hand in some official forms on physical 3.5-inch floppy disks. Digital Minister Taro Kono ran a long campaign to scrub the floppy requirement out of more than a thousand separate rules, and on July 3, 2024 he basically declared the fight won.
San Francisco is a bigger surprise. The Muni Metro light rail still loads its Automatic Train Control System (the software that runs trains safely through the Market Street subway tunnel) off 5.25-inch floppy disks, every single morning. That system was installed in 1998 and was never built to outlive its disks. The city approved a $212 million contract in late 2024 to finally replace it, with the trains expected off floppies around 2030.
BBC Japan's Government Finally Says Goodbye Floppy
Planes did it too. Boeing 747-400 jumbo jets loaded their navigation databases (the maps and flight data the cockpit relies on) off floppy disks, with a fresh disk swapped in roughly every 28 days. Those planes are being retired, but plenty still haul cargo right now.
Then there is the scary one. The U.S. Air Force ran part of its nuclear weapons messaging system, called SACCS, on 8-inch floppy disks until 2019, when it finally moved to a solid-state digital setup. The Pentagon defended the old disks for years with one blunt argument: the system had no internet connection, so nobody could hack it from across the world. Which, honestly, is true.
Why they stuck around
The disks were never really the point. The point is the old machines they plug into. A train control system that has worked since 1998 is not something you rip out just because the disk looks dated; the whole rig is dated. The control logic, the safety locks, the wiring, the official safety approvals, all of it got tested and signed off as one unit.
So swapping the floppy drive isn't a swap. It means rebuilding and re-certifying everything downstream of it, which costs millions and takes years. That's the actual reason these things lingered. The floppy is just the weird visible part. The real problem is the 1990s computing stack feeding it.
There's a security angle too. A floppy-fed system is air-gapped by default, meaning it has no network link an attacker can reach. You can't trick someone into loading malware onto it from another continent. You have to physically walk in and slide the disk into the drive. For some operators, that wasn't a flaw. It was a feature.
The format was actually smart
Give the old engineers some credit. A 3.5-inch floppy survived being shoved in a backpack, dropped on the floor, and exposed to room heat and a little moisture. The hard plastic shell, the spring-loaded metal slider, the little write-protect tab that stopped accidental erasing; all of those were clever fixes to real problems.
The earlier 5.25-inch disks, with a soft sleeve and exposed magnetic surface, were far more fragile. Step on one and the data was usually toast. The original 8-inch disks, the ones in that nuclear system, look almost funny now. About the size of a vinyl record, holding maybe a megabyte. For their job, they did it well for decades.
What is finally killing them
It isn't that the disks are wearing out, though they are. Sony, the last big maker, stopped producing 3.5-inch floppies in 2011, and the world has been burning through old stockpiles ever since. You can still buy them on eBay or from a few specialty sellers sitting on ancient inventory.
What's actually ending the floppy is the slow, pricey replacement of the systems built around it. San Francisco is upgrading its trains. Japan retired its forms. The Air Force swapped out SACCS. The 747s are getting scrapped anyway. By the end of this decade, floppies will be gone from real-world use almost everywhere; not because anyone in 2026 thinks they're a good idea, but because the systems that needed them simply aged out.
One last weird thing. That floppy in your junk drawer is probably still readable, 30 years on. Cheap USB sticks from five years ago have already died. Old tech, done right, can outlast the stuff that replaced it.
