The navigation system on his friend’s fishing boat had died and was replaced. But the old waypoints were stored on a 3-1/2 inch floppy disk that was unreadable on a normal PC.

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“Floppy disks are very reliable, very stable, a very well understood way to get information in and out of a machine,” he says. REUTERS But he is not expecting it to survive another 20 years.

Several other types of commercial aircraft also use floppy disks, including newer variants of the 747 and the 767, older Airbus A320s, and some business jets such as Gulfstreams built until the 1990s.

The disks that the 747-400 uses are the 3.5-inch kind you used to get in the mail with 15 free hours of America Online, which my dad would erase and reuse for work.

When Sony stopped manufacturing new floppy disks in 2011, most assumed the outdated storage medium – of which there is only a finite, decreasing number left – would die off.

The Japanese government is finally doing away with 3.5-inch floppy disks, almost two years after it announced its intention to scrap them. “We have won the war on floppy disks,” Taro Kono ...

MARTÍNEZ: Even people who never use a floppy disk see an image of one. A disk shows up as the save icon in many computer apps most of us use every day. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DON'T COPY THAT FLOPPY") ...

It may seem incredible, but the giant Boeing 747 is still using the old-fashioned floppy disk to update its software. And it's unlikely to change. Here's why.