Why the floppy disk just won’t die
by WIRED from Ars Technica - All content on (#69HSC)
Enlarge / Photo taken in Florence, Italy (credit: Daniele Ciabatti/EyeEm via Getty)
When Mark Necaise got down to his last four floppy disks at a rodeo in Mississippi in February, he started to worry.
Necaise travels to horse shows around the state, offering custom embroidery on jackets and vests: All of the winners would get a jacket and we'd put the name of the farm or the name of the horse or whatever on it," he says.
Five years ago, he paid $18,000 for a second-hand machine, manufactured in 2004 by the Japanese embroidery equipment specialist Tajima. The only way to transfer the designs from his computer to the machine was via floppy disk.