The floppy disk is still alive
The floppy disk is now an icon. Literally!
Jokes aside, this support, linked to a now distant past of information technology, still seems to be used in some areas. For example, the Japanese government's decision to dispose of floppies and CD-ROMs, still in use in 2022 in public offices in the Japanese country, made headlines. Many of the younger readers probably know this object more for the rescue icon present in almost all software and video games currently popular, not to mention the various memes, but for the more vintage of us, there is still a thrill of emotion thinking back to the old days, when a game came to occupy dozens and dozens of 3.5 ″ disks. The crispest of us will also remember 5.2 ″ and even 8 ″.
But, net of nostalgia, there are still those who use these media today. Just think of the aeronautical sector, where many airlines still use floppies for avionics software in aircraft with a few decades of service, or the industrial sector, where there are many companies that use machinery that is also very dated but still in perfect operating condition, that use floppies to load data.| ); }
Recently, Persky said, however, that this business is now at the end of its life. According to the entrepreneur, in fact, his business will be terminated within about four years, when, according to his estimates, he will run out of floppy stocks.
Persky had bought a large batch of floppy disks when Sony ended the production and, over time, has managed to procure stock funds, as well as to recycle old floppies, cleaned, tested and guaranteed, to market them in packages of 50 pieces.
At the moment, the company has in its warehouses about 500 thousand pieces in various sizes of 3.5, 5.2 and 8 inches, and these numbers will only drop as the site sells the latest stock.
Airlines still order floppy disks, “the last man standing in the business” explains why
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 back then, disks were the best technology available.
“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.
Expectedly, there are always people who fancy ancient objects to keep the nostalgia alive around them. Disk hobbyists are one of them, who buy 50 disks in bulks.
Can you imagine you could probably store one single image on a 1.44 MB device? They actually do more than we thought.
In 2020, after the pandemic hit the whole world hard and disrupted many industries, British Airways retired one of its Boeing 747-400s; and security researchers at Pen Test Partner have been able to poke 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. (Video below)