You’d be surprised to know that the old floppy disks are still in use today in a few industries.
Tom Perksy, “the last man standing in the floppy disk business” as he calls himself, is the founder of floppydisk.com – a company in the United States that sells and recycles ancient storage devices. The company also takes care of disk transfers, offers a recycling program, and sells used or broken diskettes to artists from all around the world, AIGA Eye on Design Magazine reports.
According to Persky, his main customers are the industrial users whom they define as the people using floppy disks as an agent for getting information in and out of a machine.
He says that the air fleets still use floppy disks as half of them are older than twenty years, and disks were the best technology available at that moment.
“That’s a huge consumer. There’s also medical equipment, which requires floppy disks to get the information in and out of medical devices,” he adds.
Disk hobbyists are one of the people who treasure ancient things, who buy 50 disks in bulks.
In 2020, after the pandemic, British Airways retired one of its Boeing 747-400s; and security researchers at Pen Test Partner have been able to know about it, The Register reports. After a quick walkthrough of the plane’s avionics and the flight deck, the official from Pen Test Partners found a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive in the cockpit that is used to load critical navigation databases.
“This database has to be updated every 28 days, so you can see how much of a chore this has to be for an engineer to visit,” the official said.
