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'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

(2022/09/20)


Floppy disks may have gone the way of the dodo and joined other extinct media such as punched cards and paper tape, but some people are apparently still using them, and one company even continues to sell them.

Floppydisk.com is a US-based company specializing in selling and recycling floppy disks, and founder Tom Persky describes himself as the "last man standing in the floppy disk business." The company, which has been around for decades, provides other services such as disk data transfers, including CD and DVD duplication, but most of its revenue apparently comes from selling blank floppy disks.

Persky features in a newly published book, [1]Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium , which looks at the way the venerable storage medium continues to be used for some purposes, even though Sony, the last company to manufacture new floppy disk media, [2]ceased production over a decade ago.

[3]

But who on Earth is still using floppy disks? According to Persky, there are industrial outfits using machinery that requires floppy disks. (This writer recalls once visiting a university that had lab equipment that still booted up from an 8in floppy.)

[4]

[5]

Only last month, it was reported that the Japanese government was [6]forced to change some laws because they still required floppy disks and CD-ROM media to be used when sharing data with many government departments.

[7]512 disk drives later, Floppotron computer hardware orchestra hits v3.0

[8]Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

[9]What do you do when all your source walks out the door?

[10]FreeDOS puts out first new version in six years

The airline industry is also a big customer, Persky says in an [11]interview taken from the book . "Probably half of the airfleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics," he said.

Some medical equipment in the healthcare industry still requires floppy disks to transfer data in and out, but the biggest customer is said to be the embroidery business as there are a large number of embroidery machines still in use that were built to load designs from floppy.

Other customers include hobbyists, who typically want to buy 10, 20, or 50 floppy disks at a time, which may or may not include those involved in projects such as the [12]Floppotron computer hardware orchestra.

[13]

While nobody now manufactures the media anymore, Floppydisk.com invested in a large quantity – "a couple of million disks," according to Persky – when production came to an end. The company has since been living off that inventory, but occasionally gets contacted by organizations that are clearing out warehouses and discover pallets full of floppies.

Pen Test Partners: Boeing 747s receive critical software updates over 3.5" floppy disks [14]READ MORE

The company now has an estimated half a million disks in stock, comprising various formats including the 3.5in, 5.25in, and 8in types as well as "some rather rare diskettes." These are not specified, but there were other formats available in the past, such as the 3in floppies used by Amstrad in the UK for its CPC home computers and the PCW office systems.

The writing must be on the wall for the venerable floppy as [15]software support is gradually phased out and the supply dries up. However, Persky said that he expects his company to be in business for at least another four years. ®

Get our [16]Tech Resources



[1] https://www.onomatopee.net/product/floppy-disk-fever/

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2010/04/26/sony_stops_selling_floppies/

[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YynjlBDWbHgW5Czd9wCivAAAABM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YynjlBDWbHgW5Czd9wCivAAAABM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YynjlBDWbHgW5Czd9wCivAAAABM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/31/japan_floppy_disk_ban/

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/15/floppotron/

[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/22/on_call/

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/11/who_me/

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/23/freedos_13/

[11] https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-standing-in-the-floppy-disk-business/

[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/15/floppotron/

[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YynjlBDWbHgW5Czd9wCivAAAABM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[14] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/10/boeing_747_floppy_drive_updates_walkthrough/

[15] https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/30/torvalds_floppy/

[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/


Hardware support still possible

M E H

In an exercise in pointlessness, a few months ago I managed to get a USB floppy drive to connect to an oldish HP Elitebook under Windows10.

It was then that I found out the copy of Windows Arcade I’d been keeping for years had been wiped.

That laptop later went kaput and I haven’t tried my floppy drive on its replacement.

Speaking Of Ancient Storage Methods .....

Miss Config

Seriously, are there still companies that use reel-to-reel tapes for mass storage ?

Re: Speaking Of Ancient Storage Methods .....

Furious Reg reader John

NASA?

Re: Speaking Of Ancient Storage Methods .....

mkusanagi

CERN is certainly using tape on some form:

https://cds.cern.ch/record/2801687

I remember reading an article suggesting that it was due to the vast amount of data they were dealing with and the fact that it was easier to recover from.

Re: Speaking Of Ancient Storage Methods .....

An_Old_Dog

You still can get 9-track reel-to-reel magtape drives which connect to your PC.

https://sunstarco.com/qualstar-9-track-tape-drives/

Re: Speaking Of Ancient Storage Methods .....

Arbuthnot the Magnificent

I work in HPC (for astronomy) and we use tons of tape, it'll be LTO or something. When you have to store PB of data for years it's still a good option.

Re: Speaking Of Ancient Storage Methods .....

martinusher

Not reel to rell as such but tape cartridges. They're still widely used for backups and other mass data storage. They're quite reliable and have been shown to reliably hold data for extended periods of time..

"Extinct media still in demand"

Mike 137

Clearly they're not extinct. Extinct means utterly gone for good, which they're obviously not if anyone at all produces or uses them. They could legitimately be called "obsolete" but not extinct.

Re: "Extinct media still in demand"

General Purpose

They are functionally extinct. New floppies are no longer produced; never again will we hear the patter of tiny floppy feet.

Thanks Dan for the heads-up...

2+2=5

Thanks for the heads-up Dan. I still have an XP laptop with a built-in floppy (and serial and parallel ports) that I keep just in case so I might invest in a box of 20 - again just in case.

[Icon: a lot of floppies suffered this fate.]

Filippo

I have a USB floppy drive. I've used it just last month, because I was cleaning up several boxes of junk and I was curious about some old floppies that were lying there. The drive worked perfectly (on Win10), I just plugged it in and a new drive letter appeared, same as any other USB drives.

Dan 55

USB drives still work in Windows 10, but the classic floppy drives connected via a ribbon cable inside the PC case don't work unless you add the driver. Linus [1]also talked about knocking classic floppy drives on the head . Unfortunately USB drives can't read anything that isn't a 1.44MB PC-formatted disk.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/30/torvalds_floppy/

johannesburgel

That depends on what USB floppy drive you have. Some can read 720 DD.

Sony Mavica

navarac

I keep a couple of boxes to use with a Sony Mavica Digital Camera. Still in perfect order, I get it out once in a while.

Re: Sony Mavica

The Oncoming Scorn

I presume that's why you need the camera.

Damn no Paris, guess this icon will have to do.

Bummer

Throatwarbler Mangrove

I was recently walking down one of the streets in my neighborhood, and some cad had flung a bunch of 3.5" floppies (dozens of them, IIRC) all over the sidewalk. Had I realized what demand there was for them, I would have collected them!

Also, in before the first commentard who insists that he never uses anything as newfangled and unnecessarily complicated as a hard drive and still mourns the death of paper tape.

Re: Bummer

An_Old_Dog

It's not dead (though dying). If you have a Teletype or similar device, you still can get paper and punch tape to feed it. http://www.aetherltd.com/supplies.html

Paul Crawford

We have a 17 year old spectrum analyser with a FDD, though it also has USB which would be easier to use.

I wrote some conversion software to get document files from may father's ancient Sharp "word processor" floppy disks in to a sensible readable / formatted text some years back, finding FDD that were working and not going to trash the disks was a challenge!

Personally good riddance, but obviously in some cases they are your only choice.

Lots of lab equipment

Red Ted

The HP Network Analyser I use has a floppy drive in it and it's the easiest way to get the data off. Whilst it's a few years old now, it's in calibration and very reliable.

I'm surprised

John Robson

that for all these "industrial" use cases they haven't developed a floppy <-> SD interface adaptor (as in replace the floppy disk drive with something of the same physical/electrical format but that takes an SD card).

Re: I'm surprised

Anonymous Coward

For my Commodore64, I am nort using floppy disks anymore. I have copied everything to a SD card. and use now only a SD card reader that acts as a disk drive.

Re: I'm surprised

Anonymous Coward

Here's one for 8" or 5.25" floppies.

https://www.arraid.com/data-storage-products/product/affd.html

Re: I'm surprised

johannesburgel

Of course "they" have, as you could have found out using a search engine. GOTEK even specifically caters to the embroidery industry, CNC etc.

Adapting new media?

mkusanagi

I wonder in how many of these cases a new type of storage device can be used. It would probably be costly, but I can imagine a Raspberry Pi connecting where the disk drive was and acting as a virtual floppy drive?

Since I doubt this is a novel concept, I wonder if anyone is aware of places which have done something of sorts?

Re: Adapting new media?

}{amis}{

I fitted one of these to a legasy warehouse control system about 10 yeas ago as far as i know its still running now : https://www.plrelectronics.com/floppy-disk-emulator/

Re: Adapting new media?

johannesburgel

There are Floppy emulators that take USB sticks. My father's company has converted multiple CNC machines over the years.

Older media still has its place

martinusher

A lot of softwre is obviously endlessly reininventing the (hamster) wheel since the prevailing sentiment seems to be "if its not the latest then its obviously no good". The problem wiht that mindset is that every time you update something you're stuck with verifying it (you do test your products, don't you?). For some types of product the testing and certification can take a lot of effort so unless there's a pressing need to update code you just don't. Not all software is an app for a smartphone or its desktop equivalent.

When was the last time you updated your anti-lock brake software? Or your kitchen's microwave?

iron

I'm not surprised floppies are still in use in industry. Back in the early 2000s I was called upon to help the IT dept fix an old 386 that was part of a Flexographic printing press. They had figured out that the BIOS battery was dead but couldn't find it on the board because it wasn't one of the 10p coin type but was soldered on. I imagine that press is probably still running today with that 386 and the new battery I soldered on to the motherboard still working.

Paul Crawford

We used to have an old Sun SPARC box that has the same issue of the CMOS clock was a chip with built-in battery so no practical option to replace it. Instead we had a laminated sheet of the boot parameters needed to get it going again if the power went off.

To be fair to that box, it ran as our mail server for something like 20 years without issue, bar the odd UPS going "bang" and failing to do the single duty a UPS has...

Wow, what old, obsolete technology!

Anonymous Coward

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to back up some data from SCSI hard drive to DDS3 tape.

(We actually still use both at $WORK. If only those machines could use USB...)

NASA

20TC

In the early 90s, NASA bought some 8" drives from a small surplus PC kit equipment shop in the UK for Space Shuttle operations.

Sometimes just having a couple of spares of old, tried and tested kit it preferable to the risk of something going wrong 300 miles up with this 'new fangled PCMCIA card' ...

Binraider

I have an old system around with a 2.88MB floppy in it. VirtualBox was my go-to of choice for quite some time, though floppy image support (in the user interface at least) was removed a while ago, so having something that can handle physical media is very occasionally useful for legacy entertainment purposes.

There is something cathartic about setting up Autoexec.bat & Config.sys that still amuses; for bizarre reasons that probably can only be rooted in familiarity and nostalgia.

Which reminds me I have a PC DOS 2000 box to muck around with at some point.

Still looking for a boxed copy of OS/2 warp 4 for similar reasons. Easy to find 2.0 or 3.0, but not so much the final release.

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says a war isn't really a war without my jokes.
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