Meet the Man Who Still Sells Floppy Disks

Eye on Design is the official blog of the US-based professional graphic design organization AIGA. They've just published a fascinating interview with Tom Persky, who calls himself "the last man standing in the floppy disk business." He is the time-honored founder of floppydisk.com, a US-based company dedicated to the selling and recycling of floppy disks. Other services include disk transfers, a recycling program, and selling used and/or broken floppy disks to artists around the world. All of this makes floppydisk.com a key player in the small yet profitable contemporary floppy scene.... Perkins: I was actually in the floppy disk duplication business. Not in a million years did I think I would ever sell blank floppy disks. Duplicating disks in the 1980s and early 1990s was as good as printing money. It was unbelievably profitable. I only started selling blank copies organically over time. You could still go down to any office supply store, or any computer store to buy them. Why would you try to find me, when you could just buy disks off the shelf? But then these larger companies stopped carrying them or went out of business and people came to us. So here I am, a small company with a floppy disk inventory, and I find myself to be a worldwide supplier of this product. My business, which used to be 90% CD and DVD duplication, is now 90% selling blank floppy disks. It's shocking to me.... Q: Where does this focus on floppy disks come from? Why not work with another medium...? Perkins: When people ask me: "Why are you into floppy disks today?" the answer is: "Because I forgot to get out of the business." Everybody else in the world looked at the future and came to the conclusion that this was a dying industry. Because I'd already bought all my equipment and inventory, I thought I'd just keep this revenue stream. I stuck with it and didn't try to expand. Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.... I made the decision to buy a large quantity, a couple of million disks, and we've basically been living off of that inventory ever since. From time to time, we get very lucky. About two years ago a guy called me up and said: "My grandfather has all this floppy junk in the garage and I want it out. Will you take it?" Of course I wanted to take it off his hands. So, we went back and forth and negotiated a fair price. Without going into specifics, he ended up with two things that he wanted: an empty garage and a sum of money. I ended up with around 50,000 floppy disks and that's a good deal. In the interview Perkins reveals he has around half a million floppy disks in stock - 3.5-inch, 5.25-inch, 8-inch, "and some rather rare diskettes. Another thing that happened organically was the start of our floppy disk recycling service. We give people the opportunity to send us floppy disks and we recycle them, rather than put them into a landfill. The sheer volume of floppy disks we get in has really surprised me, it's sometimes a 1,000 disks a day." But he also estimates its use is more widespread than we realize. "Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That's a huge consumer. There's also medical equipment, which requires floppy disks to get the information in and out of medical devices.... " And in the end he seems to have a genuine affection for floppy disk technology. "There's this joke in which a three-year-old little girl comes to her father holding a floppy disk in her hand. She says: 'Daddy, Daddy, somebody 3D-printed the save icon.' The floppy disks will be an icon forever." The interview is excerpted from a new book called Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium. Hat tip for finding the story to the newly-redesigned front page of The Verge.

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