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   https://www.floppydisk.com/   
      
   Meet the Man Who Still Sells Floppy Disks (aiga.org)   
   Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday September 17, 2022 @10:34AM from the   
   storage-spaces dept.   
      
   Eye on Design is the official blog of the US-based professional   
   graphic design organization AIGA. They've just published a fascinating   
   interview with Tom Persky, who calls himself "the 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....   
      
   Perkins: I was actually in the floppy disk duplication business. Not   
   in a million years did I think I would ever sell blank floppy disks.   
   Duplicating disks in the 1980s and early 1990s was as good as printing   
   money. It was unbelievably profitable. I only started selling blank   
   copies organically over time. You could still go down to any office   
   supply store, or any computer store to buy them. Why would you try to   
   find me, when you could just buy disks off the shelf? But then these   
   larger companies stopped carrying them or went out of business and   
   people came to us. So here I am, a small company with a floppy disk   
   inventory, and I find myself to be a worldwide supplier of this   
   product. My business, which used to be 90% CD and DVD duplication, is   
   now 90% selling blank floppy disks. It's shocking to me....   
      
   Q: Where does this focus on floppy disks come from? Why not work with   
   another medium...?   
      
   Perkins: When people ask me: "Why are you into floppy disks today?"   
   the answer is: "Because I forgot to get out of the business."   
   Everybody else in the world looked at the future and came to the   
   conclusion that this was a dying industry. Because I'd already bought   
   all my equipment and inventory, I thought I'd just keep this revenue   
   stream. I stuck with it and didn't try to expand. Over time, the total   
   number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people   
   who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those   
   two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last   
   man standing in the business, and that man is me....   
      
   I made the decision to buy a large quantity, a couple of million   
   disks, and we've basically been living off of that inventory ever   
   since. From time to time, we get very lucky. About two years ago a guy   
   called me up and said: "My grandfather has all this floppy junk in the   
   garage and I want it out. Will you take it?" Of course I wanted to   
   take it off his hands. So, we went back and forth and negotiated a   
   fair price. Without going into specifics, he ended up with two things   
   that he wanted: an empty garage and a sum of money. I ended up with   
   around 50,000 floppy disks and that's a good deal.   
      
   In the interview Perkins reveals he has around half a million floppy   
   disks in stock - 3.5-inch, 5.25-inch, 8-inch, "and some rather rare   
   diskettes. Another thing that happened organically was the start of   
   our floppy disk recycling service. We give people the opportunity to   
   send us floppy disks and we recycle them, rather than put them into a   
   landfill. The sheer volume of floppy disks we get in has really   
   surprised me, it's sometimes a 1,000 disks a day."   
      
   But he also estimates its use is more widespread than we realize.   
   "Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20   
   years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That's   
   a huge consumer. There's also medical equipment, which requires floppy   
   disks to get the information in and out of medical devices.... "   
      
   And in the end he seems to have a genuine affection for floppy disk   
   technology. "There's this joke in which a three-year-old little girl   
   comes to her father holding a floppy disk in her hand. She says:   
   'Daddy, Daddy, somebody 3D-printed the save icon.' The floppy disks   
   will be an icon forever."   
      
   The interview is excerpted from a new book called Floppy Disk Fever:   
   The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium.   
      
   Hat tip for finding the story to the newly-redesigned front page of   
   The Verge.   
      
      
      
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