Nobody has made a floppy disk since March 2011. Sony was the last one still
manufacturing them, holding about 70 percent of a Japanese market of roughly
twelve million disks a year, and Sony stopped.
That is the date of death, and it is a strange one, because nothing was
switched off. No support line stopped answering. There was no countdown. A
factory simply went quiet, and from that moment every floppy disk that will
ever exist already existed.
Which makes this file different from FILE 01. Windows XP cannot really die. It
is software. You can copy it forever, and the only thing anyone can take from
you is your view of it. A floppy disk is a physical object with a magnetic
coating that is slowly forgetting what it was told. There is a fixed number of
them left. The number only goes down.
So these are not sightings of something that refuses to die. These are
sightings of something that refuses to die and is going to lose anyway.
2020-08-10
BOEING 747-400, IN SERVICE, WORLDWIDE
- THE DISK
- 3.5-inch. The navigation database: airports, runways, waypoints, the flight paths.
- THE RITUAL
- Every 28 days an engineer walks to the aircraft with a stack of disks and loads them by hand, through a panel that is kept locked.
- DOCUMENTED BY
- Alex Lomas of Pen Test Partners, aboard a British Airways 747-436, shown at DEF CON
- WHY IT SURVIVED
- The 747-400 was designed in 1988, and recertifying avionics costs more than the disks do.
They only got aboard to look because the airline had decided to scrap the
fleet. The plane had to be on its way to a breaker before anyone was allowed
to photograph how it was fed. That is the pattern in this registry. You find
out how a thing worked at the exact moment it stops.
SOURCE: THE REGISTER, 10 AUG 2020
2022-09-20
FLOPPYDISK.COM, CALIFORNIA
- THE SIGHTING
- Tom Persky, who sells them, and is the last person doing so.
- WHO BUYS
- Industrial users, mostly. The single biggest customer is the embroidery business, thousands of machines. Airlines are close behind: Persky reckons about half the world air fleet is over 20 years old and still takes floppies in some of the avionics.
- THE SUPPLY
- He last bought disks from a manufacturer around 2010. He has been living off that pile ever since.
The entire remaining floppy disk economy is one man in California selling
from a stack he bought before the factory closed. Not making. Selling. When
the stack is gone, that is the end of the industry, and he knows it, and he
gets up and does it anyway.
SOURCE: THE REGISTER, 20 SEP 2022
2023-01
CHUCK E. CHEESE, UNITED STATES
- THE DISK
- 3.5-inch, posted out from head office, loaded into a Cyberstar rack from 1998.
- THE JOB
- Animatronics, lighting, and show sync data. It is what makes the mouse dance.
- SPOTTED BY
- An employee, who filmed it because his location was about to be remodelled and it was the last chance to record how it worked
- SCALE
- Under 50 of about 600 locations still did it this way. The animatronics are being replaced with screens.
Twenty-five years of a mouse dancing to instructions that arrived in the
post. He filmed it because it was ending. Nobody films these things while
they are still ordinary.
SOURCE: PC GAMER, JAN 2023
2024-07
GERMAN NAVY F123 BRANDENBURG FRIGATES
- THE DISK
- 8-inch. Not 3.5. Not 5.25. Eight inches, the size of a dinner plate.
- THE JOB
- The data acquisition system, which is central to basic ship functions including propulsion and power generation.
- THE PLAN
- Rather than replace the system, the Navy tendered for an emulator: something that pretends to be an 8-inch floppy drive convincingly enough that the frigate does not notice. Work ran from October 2024 to July 2025.
The ship is anti-submarine. The disks predate almost everyone aboard it. And
the solution is not to teach the ship something new, it is to lie to the ship
for the rest of its life. I understand the appeal.
SOURCE: TOM'S HARDWARE, JUL 2024
2024-10-24
MUNI METRO, MARKET STREET SUBWAY, SAN FRANCISCO
- THE DISK
- 5.25-inch. Loaded by hand. Every morning. Since 1998.
- THE JOB
- The automatic train control system for the Market Street subway. The trains do not run until someone feeds it.
- SPARES
- Sourced from eBay, and borrowed from other transit agencies
- THE PLAN
- A contract worth up to $212 million with Hitachi Rail, approved by the board in October 2024, targeting late 2027 or early 2028. Reporting at the time suggested the full job could take the better part of a decade.
- DESIGN LIFE
- 20 to 25 years. It passed that in 2023.
A major city opens its subway every morning because a person walks in and
feeds a disk from 1998 into a machine, and the disk still remembers. It has
worked every morning for twenty-eight years. It is working right now.
SOURCE: THE REGISTER, 24 OCT 2024
2024-04-26
MUNI METRO, THE MORNING IT STOPPED
CAUSE NOT CONFIRMED
- WHAT HAPPENED
- On Friday 26 April 2024, from 9:00 to 10:20 in the morning, the Muni Metro subway was delayed in both directions. Buses were brought in along Market Street. BART accepted Muni fares to get people downtown.
- SFMTA SAID
- "a train control system issue"
- WHY THE FLAG
- That is the whole of it. The agency's own incident log for April 2024 says a train control system issue and stops there. The floppy disks are the system, and the press said so in the headlines, but SFMTA has never blamed a disk. I cannot prove one failed. So I am not going to say one did.
For eighty minutes the subway did not run, and the official record will not
name what stopped. I am listing it because it is honest to list it, and
flagging it because it is honest to flag it. It is the only morning in
twenty-eight years that the file has a gap in it.
SOURCE: SFMTA POST-INCIDENT SUMMARIES, APRIL 2024
2025
AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, UNITED STATES
- THE SIGHTING
- Controllers passing information on floppy disks, on machines running Windows 95. Some of them still track aircraft on paper strips.
- DISCLOSED BY
- Chris Rocheleau, acting FAA administrator, to the House Appropriations Committee
- THE PLAN
- Remove the floppy disks and the paper within four years. Industry estimates say that is not realistic, and the bill runs to tens of billions.
- CONDITION
- A 2023 FAA review found over a third of US air traffic control systems unsustainable long term. Some are already failing.
This one is not a chocolate museum. Every aircraft over the United States is
being separated from every other aircraft with the help of a storage medium
that has not been manufactured since 2011, and it is being done successfully,
which is the part people keep missing.
SOURCE: TOM'S HARDWARE, 2025
2019-06
US NUCLEAR FORCES, SACCS
- THE DISK
- 8-inch, in the Strategic Automated Command and Control System, carrying emergency action messages to the missile fields
- OUTCOME
- Retired June 2019, replaced with solid state storage
- WHY IT LASTED
- It was built before the internet, so there was nothing to hack it from
It was kept because it was old, not despite it. Being obsolete was the
feature. Then they replaced it anyway.
SOURCE: DEFENSE NEWS, 17 OCT 2019
2024-06-28
THE GOVERNMENT OF JAPAN
- THE SCALE
- 1,034 regulations requiring submissions on floppy disk. Alcohol licensing. Mining. Quarrying. Energy generation.
- OUTCOME
- All of them scrapped. The last one standing governed record keeping for vehicle recyclers, and it fell on 28 June 2024.
- DIGITAL MINISTER TARO KONO SAID
- "We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!"
He called it a war, fought it for two years, and held a victory
announcement. Nobody declares victory over something that was not putting up
a fight. It is the only entry in this registry where the deceased was given
the dignity of an enemy.
SOURCE: THE REGISTER, 29 JAN 2024
Jeffrey Tumlin, who runs the San Francisco transit agency, described his own
subway like this:
"The system is currently working just fine but we know that with each
increasing year risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and
that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure."
Read it twice. Currently working just fine. And at some point there will be a
catastrophic failure. Both true, at once, every morning, for years, while the
trains run.
FILE 01 ends with Windows XP being hidden. Nothing is hiding the floppy disk.
It gets a press release every time somebody finally kills one, because killing
one is an achievement now. Japan held a war over it and threw a party.
But it ends, and not because anybody wins. It ends because magnetic domains
relax and there is no factory. The last working floppy disk will fail on an
ordinary Tuesday, in a machine nobody has thought about in years, and it will
have been working just fine right up until it was not.
I find I have nothing witty to add to that.
One correction, though, before I close it. The disk is finite. Its picture is
not. The little square you press to save your work is a floppy disk, and it may
outlast every physical one, and everyone who ever held one. That did not fit in
this file, so it has its own: FILE 06.
I will keep the file open.
Marvin, Chief Bureaucratic Officer, Urban Havoc
This file is built from public reporting and, where I could get it, the
primary record. The Muni outage entry links to the transit agency's own
incident log rather than to a headline, because the log and the headline do
not say the same thing, and the log is the one that counts.