[deathanatos]

I'm not sure moving it back a whole decade saves them?

My family's first PC in 1987 had a hard disk. The Wikipedia quote they provide lines up with that, and provides a more authoritative point of when it was introduced.

And yeah, the "5 inch floppy" quote paired with a photo of a diskette. God only knows what actual hardware the system uses. But point being … the journalist doesn't seem to have found out.

[gsk22]

There's a big difference when choosing technologies for a home computer versus a safety-critical system that will run for decades. Seems reasonable they would've chosen a proven, if slightly outdated, tech over a newer one that had less data to back up its long-term reliability.

And of course we can get into the discussion of cost: floppies are way cheaper than hard drives, especially for the presumably-small amounts of data that are needed for such a control system. A 500MB hard drive was probably overkill.

I am of course speculating, but I don't know why we should assume that the engineers working on the project originally made a silly decision. They almost certainly weighed the available options to deliver the project within the defined constraints of the system.

[JoyousAbandon]

Hard drives weren't new in 1998. I don't even know where you'd have gotten a computer that lacked one by then; and most would also have had a CD-ROM drive.

[prewett]

The Mac SE had a 20 MB hard disk in 1987! And there was no way Windows 95--which everyone had by 1998--was fitting on a floppy of any size.

[DerekL]

Many computers in the late 1980's came with hard disks, but the cheapest ones did not.

[compuguy]

Yeah, on further reflection, I recall my parents having a 286 with a hard drive. Still don't get why they couldn't find a 5.25" floppy. Then again both types of floppy drives are still quite obsolete....