The Floppy Disk is Not Dead, Yet. - DTNS Weekend

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2:22Welcome to the DTNS Weekend Edition, gratefully provided to you and thanks for your support of this show. This week, a special treat. We're talking to Tom Persky, the last person on Earth selling floppy disks. Yeah, you heard me right. Floppy disks. And these are new, too. Why is he doing it? Who buys them? How many does he have left? Let's find out. Tom Persky, thank you for joining me here. It's a pleasure to talk with you. Happy to do it. So describe a little bit about what you do. What is floppy disk dot com? Well, I guess floppy disk dot com is sort of the last man standing organization that sells and duplicates and transfers floppy disk information.

3:13We have kind of a strange history where I started out actually in the software business, writing business software. And we had a situation where we had a large company purchase a large quantity of our software. And back in those days, in the 1990s, we distributed software on floppy disks. And we went out and had a commercial company do the duplication for us. And the experience was okay. and the company that purchased the software actually came back and said, well, we'd like another run. And I thought, well, you know, I could probably buy the machines and do it in-house. And as part of our regular software business, there's a company called Time Value Software, which is still around, we could probably duplicate our own software.

4:13And so it all started out as a duplication business. If you asked me in 1995 whether I would ever sell a single blank floppy disk, the answer would have been, that's insane. No way. What would happen? Why? Well, because you could go to the drugstore in the corner and buy a floppy disk. Go to Egghead Software and buy a floppy disk. Go to Comp USA and buy a floppy disk. Some little guy in the corner would never sell a floppy disk. We could never compete on shelf space or advertising or pricing or anything else. And here I am, one of those 30 years later, and people say, well, why are you still in a floppy disk business?

4:59And why are you selling blank floppy disks? The answer is I forgot to get out of the business. I mean, I bought all these disks for duplication purposes. that put them in a warehouse, that developed some relationships with U.S. slash Chinese suppliers, bought sloppy disks by the container.

5:27And I always had this inventory. And as people went out of the business, it actually became hard. I mean, for example, today, if you said, hey, I need a 10-pack of blank sloppy disks, for some purpose. Yeah. Either to work as floppy disks or to do it as a joke gift or to give away as a wedding favor or whatever you might want to do. It might probably be hard for you to figure out how, you know, there's no store you can go to. You might be able to do it on eBay or Amazon, but guess who's the back end for eBay and Amazon? That would be me. so um i sort of think i'm kind of the last guy i mean i'd be happy to to be corrected but over the course of the last 10 years i said you know i'm the last guy standing and nobody else said no you're not and so uh and so here i am you know with my inventory continuing to sell blank floppy disks i have eight inch disks back in the day when rooms were filled you know a computer filled with room and a bunch of guys with white shirts and thin ties wandered around and uh i have five and a quarter inch discs and and actually the older five and a quarter inch discs which are three or which are like 500k or ibm format 360k those are more valuable than the the updated 1.2 megabyte high-density disks.

7:04I sell three-and-a-half-inch disks. I sell drives. So there's this whole sort of little bespoke, crazy little industry I have. It's great to corner a market. I shouldn't have cornered a larger one, though. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, you've courted one more market than I have, so, you know, I'll give you that.

7:33If I'm right, was it 2011 when Sony stopped manufacturing new discs? Is that correct? You know, I really don't know what the dates were because I never bought from Sony. I bought directly from iMation, which probably didn't. And, you know, with so many, you know, you could have a Sony disc or a Maxell disc or, you know, God knows what. And they're all made by the same factories in China. Right. And private labels and disc labels and all of that stuff. But we don't have manufacturers making new ones anymore, right? Oh, no. None that I'm aware of. I mean, you could probably, you know, people say, well, you know, people are still making CDs.

8:25How much harder is it to make a floppy disk and a CD? Well, if you know about CD, and one thing I sort of left out of my history is that when I started this floppy disk business, and then I thought the floppy disk business was going to go away, and I shifted to a CD and DVD duplication service. And for two decades, all of my revenue was from CDs and DVDs and floppy disks. They were sort of there in a warehouse. And whenever somebody wanted some, I sold some. It was never a significant portion of my revenue. But people say, well, if people could still make CDs and DVDs, it should be able to make a floppy.

9:13Well, just stop and think about it for a second. When you make a CD, you have this big machine, and there are thousands of machines around the world. You pour chemicals in one end, and the chemicals go into the big machine, and there's this big press. And out the other end comes a perfectly good CD. I mean, it's a very, you know, it's complex in some senses, but in other senses, in terms of what the input and what the output is, it's really quite simple. If you have a floppy disk, you probably have 11 pieces. You have the plastic shell, you have the metal shutter, you have a little spring in there.

9:52You have something called a cookie, which is the magnetic media. You have a piece of steel that holds that cookie in there. You have certain pieces of felt that wipe the disk. It's the old story. if you're 90 % of the way there, you're not even halfway done. If there's one piece of the 11 pieces or 12 pieces or 13 pieces that you need, you're not there. You can't do it. Now, I've been told that, you mentioned Sony. I think it was in Japan. There were two companies that made the magic cookie, which is the magnetic media sheet. And nobody makes that anymore. They manufactures that. And even if they manufacture the material, nobody cuts it and seals it and connects it.

10:51So that's all gone, and it's been gone for a long, long time. Now, I know you do some recycling of floppy disks for resale, but you also still have fresh ones, right? Or as fresh as they can be. How long have you had that inventory? Episode prep gets messy when research, Slack threads, and script trackers are all in different places. That's where ChatGPT work comes in. Give it the goal and connect to the tools where work happens, like apps and files. and it can help pull the pieces into a draft you can review without you having to re-explain the project at every step. For example, ChatGPT work can gather team feedback from Slack and use it to suggest updates to a project brief in Google Docs.

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14:30How long have you had the new ones, the previously unused ones, let's call them? Well, I started buying them in 95 and I still have some left. It's hard to say, stuff comes in, stuff goes out. We call it, in the computer parlance nowadays, They call it new old NOS, new old stock.

14:55I won't get to with you, but people say, well, I want a disc that was manufactured recently. I said, well, no, you don't. They said, well, what do you mean? What do you mean I don't? I said, well, when they first made the first million floppy disks, they were figuring out how to do it. And then they made 50 billion floppy disks, and they knew exactly how to do it. And they were very sophisticated and big industrial processes. And when you got a version of Windows and Microsoft on 31 disks or 36 disks, each one had to work. Yeah, I remember. In the meat of that time, you know, in the fat part of that time, they really knew what they were doing.

15:52They were producing fantastic discs. And then, you know, as it moved from being high-end manufacturing to lower-end manufacturing, as cost-cutting came in, you moved from having a metal shutter to a plastic shutter. the thickness of the casing went down, the quality of the material went down, the testing went down. And so if somebody said,

16:26hey, I need a floppy disk and it's got to work. It just has to work. And I had a choice between one that was made in the last year of manufacturing and the one that was made in the middle of the manufacturing, which was like, I don't know, 1990, 1995, 2000. I'd pick that one all day long. And just to add one more aspect to this, people say, well, why doesn't USB replaced all this stuff? The answer is, I don't know what your experience is. My experience with USB is not that great. If I had to bet my life on whether or not data had been stored and is retrievable, and you gave me a 1995 floppy disk that was in somebody's disk drawer and not on somebody's car dashboard at 130 degrees, but kept in a reasonably temperate environment, my chances of getting information off a floppy disk is 95%, 98%, 99%.

17:3399%. No problem. The chance of getting it off of a USB, it's a crapshoot. That's my experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and it makes sense that the middle range of the run would be the highest quality when it's in the biggest demand and needs that reliability. I know you gave some interviews around four years ago saying that you had probably about four years of inventory left. How close are you to that prediction being correct? Better than I'd like. I would, you know, I, you know, every day stuff comes in, stuff goes out, you know, people, you know, people sell me small lots of floppy disks. You know, I went to my back closet, I'm cleaning out my house.

18:20I found 200 floppy disks. Will you buy them for me? The answer is yes, I will, but not, you know, not going to be that big of a deal. Sure, yeah, yeah. Shippy's going to be a big deal. what is a great day you know a red letter day for me is when I get a call from the guy in the warehouse saying hey we're cleaning out the warehouse we found two pallets and we're taking them to the dump will you take them off our hands that's a red letter that's a great day that hasn't happened to me in a long time but it's kind of like the last scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, remember? There's that warehouse that goes back.

19:03I assure you that there's a million floppy disks in warehouses somewhere. You just don't know where they are. That are going to go either to me or to the dump. In terms of existing inventory, I would say I'm pretty close to right. I'd say that I have six months of inventory. A little comes in every day. A little goes out every day. hard to say when it is but I'm 77 years old so it's time for me to hang up the physical media there is that what happens? you run out of discs? you retire? yeah pretty much yeah I mean we have a few other you know kind of businesses that we do we still do some duplication work you know and that's a high margin good job for us.

19:56We have what we call our floppy disk transfer service, where somebody finds a floppy disk, a 5 1⁄4 inch floppy disk or a 3 1⁄2 inch floppy disk with data on it that they want. It could be an old address book or the grandmother's will or photographs that they took with one of those old floppy disk cameras. And we'll pull the data off of there and send it to them on one of those irresponsible USB drive. And then they can put it on a hard drive and get their stuff back. So, you know, I'll probably keep my toe in it. It'll move out of my warehouse probably into my garage. And I think it'll happen in the next 12 months.

20:45Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Because I imagine the number of customers has been dwindling some. I know Japan just recently ended their long mandate to store things on floppy disks. Who are your current customers for floppy disks that they're going to use to write to? We have a variety. You have the classic hobbyist of people who are into computers, and they'll want floppy disks for that. We have some business people who have a, if it ain't broke, don't fix it view of the world. Those are people like court reporters who have those machines, you know, typing those stenographic machines that have floppy disks.

21:32We have embroidery companies where the way you get the image on the cap or on the shirt is by telling the embroidery machine to do it. The way you communicate to that machine. is via a floppy. So we have that industrial company, customer. We have, you know, in the US, you know, most of the airplanes we fly are, you know, five or 10 years old, not too much older than that. But out there, you know, in the third world, there are plenty of old airplanes. I would say maybe a third of the airplanes that are in commercial service now, maybe not a third, maybe a quarter, were built 20 years ago. And if you wanted to tell the airplane where the runway was at a particular airport or if you had some special, there's some avionics that record how close you come to mountain peaks and other kinds of things.

22:40And you wanted to get that information in and out of the airplane, you do it with a floppy disk. And the airplane's still flying. The airframe is still good. The engines are still good. You know, and the floppy disks are still there. We also, let's see, I'm trying to think. We also have, you know, we do recycle floppy disks. And so people will send us, you know, use floppy disks. We'll clean them up and we'll try to resell them. but as part of that process we'll get a fallout of an X number that failed to reformat or just in bad condition and there's quite an active what I call artist and promotional kind of world if you can look at our website at floppydisc.com there's some examples of art that's done with floppy disks It sounds ridiculous, but the stuff is gorgeous.

23:41I mean, it's absolutely mind-blowing how beautiful and how inventive people are using some of this obsolete media. Yeah, like making portraits out of them. Yeah, that's wild. And then we have other kinds of goofy ideas where people have IT conferences, and instead of having a name badge that they would clip onto their – I was going to say their suit coat shows you how old I am. Clip onto their hoodie to identify themselves. You just put a lanyard through one of the holes in a three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk, and we print all of the conference information and the name of the attendee on that, it becomes their ticket.

24:31Oh, that's cool. So there's a lot of uses for it. I think, I don't know if you want to go how far afield you want to go in this chat, but there's something magical about floppy disks that people have a connection and remember.

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25:49so yeah that's why no i think so in fact you know i'm wondering if it's is it other kinds of weird uses of the disc do you think it's too early to write the obituary of the floppy disc yes i mean there's a there's an old joke it's not my joke of you know the the father has his little girl run in and say, daddy, daddy, look what I found. And she holds up a floppy disk. And the dad says, do you know what that is? She says, yeah, somebody 3D printed the save icon.

26:29There's something, you know, I have a kind of a crazy view of this. I think floppy disks represent the last time we knew where our stuff was. And what I mean by that is that, you know, back in the day when, you know, you wrote something and you could give somebody a piece of paper of what you wrote or you could hand them or you did a spreadsheet and you wanted to share a spreadsheet, you put it on a floppy disk, you used what we affectionately used to call the sneaker net. That's a word that's familiar to it. So you sneakernet it over to somebody else or you make a copy of it. It used to be ads saying, don't copy that floppy.

27:19That was a huge copyright violence. I think that's the last time we understood where our stuff was. Now, if I ask you, you know, where is your Google Mail? well 8 % of it's in Iceland and 4 % of it's in Santiago, Chile it's in a data center all over the place and we don't really know where it is and we don't really know how it's stored and we're not super sure of how it's shared or who shares it or who has access to it it was the last time the ken of human understanding was consistent And we're gone now. It's gone. That's gone. Yeah, that's interesting because when I think about floppy disks, I can tell you what was on each one I can remember.

28:12And I had one of those little caddies, right? And you'd flip through it. Right. Do you find the one you need? I even had an IBM Disc Valet, a little fancy album that you open them up. But even with USB sticks, you know there's a lot of things on them. You know there's a lot of things on your hard drive, but it's not as unitary as the floppy disk was. Right. And it was never as personal. You never put it in your shirt pocket and took it home. Yeah, yeah. And there's just something about sort of understanding where your stuff was that was very comforting because it was within normal understanding.

28:56now we don't have that and I think it's disquieting for people and that floppy disk, nobody sees a floppy disk without grit whenever somebody comes into my office and they see one of them for the first time, there's a grin you know nobody frowns and says, oh that absolutely is it John everybody says, oh I remember when I was 11 and when people see the 8 inch ones they probably their eyes bug out well they think they're phony they're a novelty well Tom Persky thank you very much for chatting with me man and helping increase my own and hopefully some others appreciation of the form factor I really appreciate that happy to do it thanks for your interest And like we say here, let's save the world 1.44 megabytes at a time.

29:59I love that. That is fantastic. If people need the transfer service or the duplication service or a 10-pack of mixed colors of floppy disk, where do they go? You have to get out your pencil and pen and piece of paper because it's hard to remember. Floppydisk.com. Yeah. Disc with a K, folks. Disc with a K. Tom, thank you so much. I appreciate it. All right. Thanks a lot. Bye. Once again, a big thank you to Tom Persky for sharing his expertise with us. A real pleasure talking to that guy and being able to relive some of that history while realizing that it's not entirely history. It's not all dead.

30:43But just to know, one of the reasons that I ended up talking to Tom was for an article I'm writing for a magazine called Geezer on the reported death of the floppy disk and its apparent exaggeration. So look for that in the November issue of Geezer magazine. Thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us. Thanks for supporting us at Patreon.com slash DTNS. We're back with the news on Monday. Talk to you then.

31:17The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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