“Floppy disks” are two words that evoke long-term memories for those who remember when those things were. Floppy disks have been the primary storage method of how data was stored and shared since the world’s first home computers over 40 years ago.
This month, 73-year-old Tom Persky found himself fielding interview questions about floppy disks from Reuters, NPR and the authors of a new book — not to mention appearing on CNN in 2017. Its existence offers a strange and stimulating opportunity to reflect on the technology stack we have today, a large ecosystem where one medium constantly feeds into another, bringing unexpected challenges – and some uncomfortable questions.
But most amazingly, the seemingly archaic floppy-disk format is still alive and well in the world – thanks to the relentless efforts of one particular entrepreneur, the self-described “last man standing in the floppy disk business.”
Floppy disk heaven
In a picturesque industrial park in California’s Lake Forest, Reuters visited Persky’s one-of-a-kind warehouse, a floppy disk heaven with many different colored disks — green, orange, blue, yellow or black disks — so that the “world shipped from the environment” stacks neatly on his warehouse shelves.
CNN called it “where all your floppy disks went.”
“I started as a tax attorney, then a software developer, then a duplication company, and now I’m selling floppy disks,” Persky told me in an email interview Thursday.
Then, “Who knew?” he added jokingly.
Persky’s ongoing career finally culminates in the upcoming “Floppy Disk Fever: Curiosity After a Fluctuating Midlife.” In the interview, Persky recalls how his wife first bought floppydisk.com 30 years ago (“around 1990”) — but as of 2002, it was Persky’s only business. Multiplication Floppy disks.
“Never in a million years did I think I would be selling blank floppy disks,” he told the book’s authors. “In the 1980s and early 1990s, duplicating discs was as good as printing money. It was incredibly profitable. Over time, I started selling blank copies. But while 90 percent of the business was duplicating CDs and DVDs, now 90 percent of the business is selling blank floppy disks.”
“It was shocking to me,” Persky said in the book.
He is keeping the business going with the help of three employees. “Technology is fun,” Persky told me Thursday, “I enjoy solving an unlimited number of problems that people come up with…” And Persky offers the service of extracting files stored on floppy disks to people who no longer have access. to reach them.
In the year “There are still millions of floppy disks of original novels and dissertations and address books and all kinds of things that people want to get rid of that data,” Persky said in a 2015 podcast. “And that work is very exciting,” Persky told the authors of the latest book.
“It’s good to know that we’re getting things that people really need.”
Indeed, the book’s description on Amazon itself promises to challenge outdated thinking — while conveying an important message.
“By looking at the present technology of the past, we can evaluate the present situation and imagine the future developments of the media landscape. . . .”
A computer repair shop in North Carolina displays a tower of 50 disks like a curio from the past – complete with a label that says what they are. Image by David Cassel.
Rethinking the future
The foreword to the forthcoming book is written by someone with their own admiration for long-ago technologies: Lori Emerson, an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and founder of the Media Archeology Lab, a museum of obsolete technologies.
“It’s a hands-on lab filled with media that still works from the late 19th century to the present moment,” Emerson said in an email interview. Some of our favorite visitors are young people from the 1970s who usually ol’ our computers and game consoles and then start checking out the less obvious, unattractive boxes, crates, trays, envelopes and cabinets full of floppy disks. Of all sizes – some with handwritten labels, some printed with corporate logos, many completely blank. Often these young people would pick up the floppies and wave them in the air and say, ‘I didn’t know they were floppies!’
“We even give them floppies, watching them leave the lab and yearn for a world they’ve never seen before, and dream of a future world that’s no different from the world they are in now.”
Emerson says she’s not “averse” to a return to some golden age of floppy disks — but she sees them as an inspiring time of seriousness and contemplation, as vehicles for “rethinking what can be practical and philosophical.” If we deliberately adopt smaller and slower computers, what will change our processes and the quality of our lives? What if the limitations offered by floppy disks make us rethink the amount of power and electronics we use on a regular basis? And what if floppy disks introduced a tracking-free method of file sharing?”
According to Emerson, the forthcoming book “will give us many opportunities to reimagine the computer now and in the future in a way that is different from what has been imposed on us by the computing industry.”
The airline industry still thrives on relying on 90’s technology for a company that sells floppy disks https://t.co/cuRwspsXzk
— South China Morning Post (@SCMPNews) October 21, 2022
Living in a time war
Many industries are still using floppy disks. Persky told Reuters they are used in the embroidery and tool and die industries, and told CNN in 2017 that most of his customers were commercial and industrial. Floppy disks were used in everything from commercial aviation to ATM machines, and it even sold disks to the US government. (In 2016, CNBC reported that US nuclear forces have 8-inch floppy disks integrated into computer systems.)
However, Persky told CNN he was the last man standing in the business “because I forgot to get out of the business.” When the book’s authors asked Persky how many floppy disks he had, he gave two answers: “Something on the order of half a million” and “Not as many as I’d like.” He added, “People have been living out of containers for five or ten years.”
Persky told CNN in 2017, “In this office, the production of floppy disks is over. And so all the discs that work they have It’s done.”
But in an amazing miracle, people keep at it. Sending He discs. “Every day is Christmas because all these packages come in every day,” Persky told the book’s authors. (“If it’s in a paper sleeve, maybe it has a coffee ring stain on it? Not a good sign,” Persky joked on a 2015 podcast.)
And so it goes on, anointed with a destiny unmatched by anyone alive. “Yes, there are probably hundreds of thousands or millions of new unused discs in the world,” Persky told me Thursday, “but they’re scattered around the planet. No one knows where they are.”
After all these years, he knows of no other comparable stock – anywhere in the world. If a Metro destroys its warehouse in Southern California, “this business will simply disappear.” Boogie whips, typewriters, 8-track tapes… hey, life goes on… obladdy, obladda…”
“I’ll be here as long as people want to get these discs — but not forever,” Persky told Reuters.
And when I asked him what it felt like to be the last man in the floppy disk business, he turned to philosophy and answered with a John Lennon poem.
Life happens when you are busy making other plans.
