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The last man selling floppy disks says he still receives orders from airlines:
Do you remember floppy disks? The archaic storage device used to ruled computers of the 1980s and 1990s, but a good number of you reading this may have never seen or used one before. Surprisingly though, they still hold a place in one specific and unlikely setting: airlines.
Long before the days of SSDs, USB drives, or even CD and DVDs, floppy disks used to rule the computer world. There's a high chance that you haven't used a floppy in a decade or two, if ever. The legacy medium was eventually replaced by newer and better technology until it simply fell into a state of complete extinction -- or so we thought.
Tom Persky, founder of floppydisk.com, doesn't agree with the idea that floppy disks are "useless" or "extinct." Tom regularly repairs, recycles, and sells floppy disks to anyone who may want their hands on the old technology. The site even has that old retro feel of old websites from the 1990s and early 2000s, as shown below.
[...] Workers in the medical field are also common visitors, as some devices used on patients still use floppy disks to this day, over 50 years after their invention. There's also people, whom he calls "hobbyists," who flock to the site to "buy 10, 20, or maybe 50 floppy disks." These groups of customers are certainly interesting, but Tom emphasizes one workplace that constantly purchases new floppy disks: airlines.
Airlines have a high demand for floppy disks, and they serve as a significant portion of Persky's sales through floppydisk.com. "Take the airline industry for example. Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in the avionics. That's a huge consumer." To put that in context, in 2020, the total number of planes in the US commercial aircraft fleet was 7,690, and that number has likely grown since Aeroweb posted those numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Thursday September 22 2022, @03:20PM (1 child)
Those have been around for several years now. I have one that I put in an external case. They are pretty good, lots of little mod options to put various displays and knobs and so on to do various things.
https://www.gotekemulator.com/ [gotekemulator.com]
https://hxc2001.com/ [hxc2001.com] (an alternative that you can build yourself if you know how to solder and order pcb:s)
https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy/wiki/ [github.com]
But to connect this to the main story. A Gotek drive for example just slots into the floppy bay and connects to the machine using the same cables and ports. So I don't see why they wouldn't do that if they just use a standard floppy in their medical equipment etc. If it wasn't for various certifications and insurance things etc.
(Score: 4, Informative) by choose another one on Friday September 23 2022, @08:01AM
[my bold] Bingo we have a winner...
Floppies, IIRC, are used in aviation for uploading/installing software updates onto aircraft systems.
Bear in mind the service life of a commercial aircraft is >30yrs and they are designed years before that and have a manufacturing-run in decades as well... people are still flying aircraft that were designed and certified in the early 80s. Heck, Boeing is still building 737s where major parts of the a/c were designed and certified in 1950s/60s.
Capacity of the floppies is not an issue because they are updating systems from the same era, so the capacity of the systems is similarly limited (which can be a severe constraint if you want to change things in software - Boeing ran into major problems when they had to implement the 737-MAX software kludge properly rather than half-arsed-unsafe).
Avionics software is kinda safety/mission critical, just a bit, producing a new hardware solution for the upload might be almost trivial, producing and certifying it might well cost in the 10s of millions or even more. Hence if there is/was a certified non-floppy upgrade available at all it might well have a unit price tag in six or seven figures... which means that actual replacement floppies become really quite valuable.