The Last Man Standing in the Floppy Disk Business
Since late January, TidBITS Talkers have been reminiscing about floppy disks and other storage media of yesteryear. It has been a lovely conversation, with links to articles about groups just now moving away from floppies (Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) and others that continue to rely on them (San Francisco’s subway).
David Silbey just contributed a link to a must-read interview with the guy who is singlehandedly keeping many of the world’s floppy disk-based systems going. In a September 2022 post in the AIGA Eye on Design newsletter, Niek Hilkmann & Thomas Walskaar write:
Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed “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.
If you want to continue down the floppy disk rabbit hole, the interview comes from a book called Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium (it’s more readily and inexpensively available from Amazon for those in the US).
Such a great interview.
Thanks for that info about the METI in Japan. I was surprised! Just told my friends here in Japan about it. Interesting.
I know from my own experience - both as an Apple computer historian of sorts and as a dedicated vintage computer enthusiast - that it is great to know that floppydisk.com still exists to serve our needs. I am a very satisfied customer of their floppy products!
I see a fair number of floppy disks showing up at local estate sales, and I keep wishing there were something I could do to rescue them for the people who still use them; but it’s not something I could really handle at scale. Any idea how floppydisk.com handles acquiring stock? I didn’t see anything in a quick scan of the website.
You could just e-mail or phone them. Since it’s a small operation, you should be able to get in touch with someone who can help.
BTW, I’ve corrected your link. It’s floppydisk.com. The link you (and others) have used in replies (with a “c”) is the wrong link and points to a domain squatter.
I’ve corrected the link in my quote of your message. https://www.floppydisk.com/ [and I’ve fixed the previous links -Adam]
From the web site:
"We buy new floppy disks and recycle used ones.
NEW DISKS:
We buy quantities of disks from 100 to 100,000.
Send us a picture of your disks,
and call us (800) 397-7890 for a quote.
RECYCLE 3.5" FLOPPY DISKS:
We accept any quantity of diskettes. If you send more than 200 disks, we reimburse shipping based on media mail rates.
It’s easy.
Just send your discs to:
Floppydisk Recycle Program
26439 Rancho Parkway South,
Suite 155, Lake Forest CA 92630"
Thanks for the info!
Here’s an article about “The Rise and Fall of 3M’s Floppy Disk” that you might find an interesting read, albeit a bit long. I certainly remember using floppy disks years (decades?) ago.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/3m-floppy
As this article comments, “If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds are if they have a few gray hairs hanging out on their scalp, they might say that the company makes floppy disks.”
Another interesting comment in the article: " It would only be a couple of years before Apple would put the first dagger in the heart of the floppy disk with the iMac, breaking with tradition by releasing a personal computer in 1998 with no built-in floppy disk drive."
Finally, if the webpage doesn’t change, I see in the Related Stories section at the top right of the page, there’s a link to a Mac article: “Designing the first Apple Macintosh: The Engineer’s Story.”
—Steve