SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by VLM on Friday September 23 2022, @12:48PM
According to my pilot buddy its nav data, think of aviation plates for each registered airport. Nothing changes very often, but its rather important to keep up to date that runway 10 was paved over last year or whatever. Obviously you use "real" tools for flight planning but in an emergency you hit the "find nearest rwy longer than 8kft or whatever" and it better not have out of date info.
Note that "airplanes" don't use floppy disks, type accepted avionics devices use them. It costs a lot more and takes a lot longer, but you can replace a GPS unit in an airplane with a new one much like you'd swap out a car radio.
Its just a question of money; is it cheaper to buy a $30K avionics GPS or $20 of floppies and replace the unit next year or next decade? The old one is approved and tested and guaranteed to work, it just is annoying to use floppies.