If you are very young, you may have never seen or held one of these storage units. For many years, floppy disks were the primary data storage platform, but today they no longer exist or so we thought. There is still a vfloppy disk vendor and its main
Floppy disks or floppy disks between the 1980s and 1990s were used to store data. These units in their latest version had a 1.44 MB capacity. To give us an idea, an image taken with a smartphone usually occupies between 2 and 3 MB, so we could not save a modern photo on these devices.
You can always buy floppy disks, for the laughs
It was in the late 1990s and early 2000s that the first 8MB to 32MB USB flash drives started to arrive. floppy disksovernight they were totally obsolete. But, curiously, the floppy disks are still alive.
Although floppy disks may be considered “extinct”, they are still they can buy. The Web diskette.com, founded by Tom Persky, continues to sell this storage system. Tom currently repair, recycle and sell floppy disks regularly.
The website is not only a trip down memory lane for selling floppy disks, but also for its design. This website reminds us of those typical websites from the late 90s and early 2000s, with a very simple design. For what else?
Persky wrote a book in which he talks about these storage devices and their main customers. Inside the book, he comments, “Imagine it’s 1990 and you’re building a big industrial machine. You design it to last 50 years and you want to use the best technology available.
This curious phenomenon makes sense, since we could see it even in the future with CDs or DVDs. These optical media are more or less dead, but there are many systems, including industrial machinery, who use them and will use them for many years. Well, it seems that among the clients Persky’s strengths are the airlines and companies that manufacture machinery for medicine.
“Obsolete” technology that continues to cross the skies
It’s certainly interesting to learn that a large portion of Persky’s floppy drive sales come from airlines. “Let’s take the example of the airline industry. Probably half of the airline fleet in the world today is over 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in avionics. He’s a big consumer,” he says in his book.
According to Aeroweb, in 2020 there were a total of 7,690 commercial aircraft in the United States.
Although it has certain uses and there is a small market for them, it will dwindle over the years until it is gone. Moreover, recently in Japan they launched a “war” to exterminate them. They want to make a standard for Japanese companies to stop using them and switch to optical discs or more modern solutions.
Floppy disks have one problem and that is that they are very sensitive to radiation. This type of storage units degrades your information very quickly and more nowadays. Radio waves, such as Wi-Fi or just the phone signal, can damage information and cause the device to fail.
