Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed “last man standing in the floppy disk business.” He is the time-honored founder of floppydisk.com, a US-based company dedicated to the selling and recycling of floppy disks. Other services include disk transfers, a recycling program, and selling used and/or broken floppy disks to artists around the world. All of this makes floppydisk.com a key player in the small yet profitable contemporary floppy scene.
While putting together the manuscript for our new book, Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium, we met with Tom to discuss the current state of the floppy disk industry and the perks and challenges of running a business like his in the 2020s. What has changed in this era, and what remains the same?
With the amount of legacy systems still running all over the world, there’s probably decent longevity in this business still.
What a nice way to have a “retirement job”. Doing something you love, making money, and helping people at the same time.
Don’t get me wrong, I would prefer moving on from legacy stuff, and keeping floppies for museums. However there is still a valid need for occasional found memories in an old box, or a very old system.
That being said “floppy emulators” are now a thing. If one needs a floppy drive, it is possible to use USB instead, but emulate the old protocol.
https://www.amazon.com/Gotek-SFR1M44-U100-1-44MB-Floppy-Emulator/dp/B0762NCHC6
One small thumbdrive will help emulate 1000 floppies.
I love floppies for retro systems. I have a NuXT sitting next to me atm, with a floppy drive attached, and a USB floppy drive attached to my Windows laptop. File transfer via floppies is the best! (As long as it’s small files :))
True…. There is something special about physical disks. But eventually they will stop working. I enjoy it as long as I can.
I would like to remind that Pentagon in 2018 set an ambitious goal to get rid of the 8″ floppy disks still used in the Department of Defense. Pentagon failed that goal and succeeded to get rid of the 8″ floppies only in 2019, 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 -inch floppies are still heavily used, and there is no plan to get rid of them at all.
Boeing aircrafts still use 3 1/2-inch floppies for installing updates.
8 inch disks have a longer life span than 5,25 and 3,5 inch disks. Two reasons. One is that there are longer spacing between tracks, and the other is that the material is of more premium quality. But eventually 8 inch will die as well from bit rott, and gotek might be the only solution.
At some point, everything have switched to something like Gotek. Drives have longer lifespan than physical disks, so the when the last floppy disk is dead, we keep using gotek.