The Return of the Floppy Disk? Why Critical US Infrastructure Still Relies on 1980s Tech.

Imagine a control room in the Midwest of the United States, complete with fluorescent lighting, rows of outdated monitors, and technicians wearing headsets monitoring the movement of planes traversing the interior of the nation. One desk has a device that takes floppy disks, nestled next to a keyboard that appears to have survived the Clinton administration. It’s not an exhibit in a museum. The infrastructure is operational. In some areas of the US air traffic control system, this describes the current situation rather than the distant past. Furthermore, the fact that the majority of people find this surprising reveals something intriguing about how easily the nation has learned to ignore it.

The thin, square piece of magnetic film known as a floppy disk, which was used by a whole generation to transfer software between school computers, never truly vanished. It simply withdrew to areas that the general public hardly ever visits. Eight-inch floppy disks are used as part of the command infrastructure of the US nuclear weapons force, which runs on an outdated computer system from the 1970s.

A portion of the Federal Aviation Administration’s network is powered by computers from the 1980s and 1990s, some of which are still running Windows 95, a program that Microsoft stopped supporting twenty years ago. These are not operations on the periphery. These systems oversee the nation’s nuclear arsenal and control the world’s busiest airspace.

The 2025 Newark Airport disruptions, which resulted in hundreds of delays and cancellations at one of the nation’s busiest hubs due to radar and communication outages, brought this discussion back into the public eye with unsettling clarity. With some drama, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy referred to it as the nation’s most significant infrastructure project in decades. He wasn’t blatantly incorrect. He may have understated the length of time the issue had been quietly building up while budgets were slashed and modernization plans stalled in bureaucratic order. Newark was not an exception. It was basically the norm, according to Michael Huerta, a former FAA administrator who chaired a safety review panel looking into the system two years ago.

It’s not precisely incompetence that has allowed these technologies to endure. It’s more akin to institutional inertia coupled with an engineering logic that seems illogical to outsiders. This point has been made quite forcefully by Kevin Murrell, director of the National Museum of Computing, which is located at Bletchley Park in England and was once a wartime codebreaking site but is now devoted to computing history. He points out that floppy disks from forty years ago are frequently still perfectly readable.

As newer storage technologies promised more and sometimes delivered less, the magnetic format’s stability became less apparent. CDs were meant to last a lifetime. Many didn’t. Zip drives appeared and vanished. After a brief period of popularity in the late 1990s, Jaz drives are now essentially archaeological artifacts. Because it was based on simpler physics, the floppy simply continued to function.

Beyond government buildings, a similar logic is at work in industrial settings. Production lines in manufacturing facilities in the US and Europe are still powered by knitting machines, CNC lathes, and precision cutters—factory machinery constructed in the 1980s and built around floppy disk input. The original manufacturers of those devices are frequently no longer in business. Their code operates on hardware that is no longer manufactured. In order to replace the entire system, a production line would need to be shut down, new equipment would need to be sourced, workers would need to be retrained, and all the uncertainty associated with untested machinery would need to be introduced. Thus, the floppy disk remains. In contrast to the millions it produced in the mid-1990s, Verbatim, one of the few companies still making them, now produces thousands of disks each month. The market is tiny but vital to those who rely on it.

The issue with the FAA in particular is that the lack of modernization cannot be adequately explained by money alone. In an interview with NPR, Huerta was open about this. The agency has occasionally received funding for upgrades but has struggled to put them into practice, in part because it is truly challenging to deploy new technology while maintaining an operational, safety-critical system.

Air traffic control cannot be turned off for a weekend while new equipment is installed by technicians. Because the current system must continue to function, both new and old infrastructure must operate concurrently, meaning that the older systems are never fully decommissioned. Many large-scale infrastructure operators are aware of this trap, but few have successfully avoided it. According to Huerta, the FAA has been asked to accomplish more with less, which is a condensed account of decades of underfunding disguised as fiscal restraint.

The odd duality at the heart of it all is difficult to ignore. The United States is a global leader in artificial intelligence research, cloud computing, and semiconductor design, creating technology that the rest of the world aspires to. Meanwhile, a technician is managing something that millions of people rely on on a daily basis by sliding a floppy disk into a machine somewhere in a building close to a major American city.

At the same time, both are true. It is still genuinely unclear whether the Trump administration’s push for a real ATC overhaul will result in long-lasting outcomes that are sufficiently funded, skillfully carried out, and finished before the next big failure. At least rhetorically, the will seems to be present. It appears from the history of these modernization initiatives that rhetoric and results don’t always align.