The last floppy disk was produced in 2011 and although no new stock has been produced for over a decade, there are still people and organizations who rely on these aging and slow media.
The BCC reports on Tom Persky, an American entrepreneur who has been selling “new” and sealed floppy disks for years, an apparently profitable business. Persky operates the website Floppydisk.com, offering 3.5″ disks starting at about $1 each. Man has customers all over the world, and these can be divided 50% between hobbyists and enthusiasts of old technologies on the one hand, and the other 50% between users who operate in sectors such as the industrial one. This last category includes people who at work use machines that require floppy disks to function, forced to use a medium that the rest of the world has forgotten.
“I still sell thousands of floppy disks to the aeronautical industry,” explains Persky, without going into detail because many customers don’t want specifics to be mentioned but it is known that on planes like the Boeing 747 floppy disks are needed to load software updates that are important for some systems used for navigation and avionics systems. These aircraft are no longer very common in Europe and the United States but Persky explains that they are still used in various developing countries. Floppy disks are also used in machinery found in various factories, government systems, older animatronics devices, robotic puppets, and the like.
The Muni Metro, the tram network serving the city of San Francisco managed by the San Francisco Municipal Railway, still uses floppy disks to manage safety systems for train circulation to upload details on the lines every morning and set restrictions relating to railway line. These train running systems do not involve the use of hard disks and there is no other way to use software. An expert explains that this is also an advantage from a security point of view: “If the floppy disk is the only way to interface, the only way to get malware onto the computer would be the floppy disk, a somewhat limiting factor from the attacker’s point of view”.
Japan only removed the imposition of the floppy disk as a legal method of data presentation at the end of 2023.
