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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, Interesting) by lentilla on Friday September 23 2022, @01:40AM (2 children)
What I'd love is a printer that could print out one single line of text. Nothing fancy, just ASCII in a clear monospaced font. So many times I want to get a quick hardcopy of something (system credentials to put in my wallet, a shopping list, URLs, etc). Wouldn't it be nice to send that to the printer, advance the platen an inch, neatly tear off the strip of paper and put that in your pocket and get on with your day?
You know that technology is not where we imagined it when you find yourself copying an eighty-character encoded string by hand on to a piece of paper. Or when you are fighting with a form and think "thirty years ago I would have popped this into a typewriter and I'd be finished already".
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday September 23 2022, @09:02AM
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday September 23 2022, @12:43PM
Take a picture on your phone?
I do that all the time when working on machinery, ranging from little electronic things to big cars.