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

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2:06Welcome to the DTNS Weekend. Edition, greatfully 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 discs. Yeah, you heard me right. Floppy discs. 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 to you. Happy to do it. So describe a little bit about what you do. What is floppydisc.com? Well, I guess floppydisc.com is sort of the last man standing organization that sells and duplicates and transfers floppy disc information. We 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,

3:12purchased a large quantity of our software. And back in those days in the 1990s, we distributed software on floppy discs. And we went out and had our 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 the house. And as part of our regular software business, it was a company called Time Value Software, which is still around. We could probably duplicate our own software. And so it all started out as a duplication business. If you asked me in 1995, whether I would ever sell a single blank floppy disc, the answer would have been that same. No way. Why? Because you could go to the drug store in the

4:16corner by floppy disc. Go to egghead software. You could have comp USA and by floppy disc. Some little guy in the corner would never sell a floppy disc. We could never compete on shelf space or advertising or pricing or anything else. And here I am one of this 30 years later. And people say, well, why are you still in this floppy disc business? Why are you showing blank floppy disc? The answer is I forgot to get out of the business. I mean, I bought all these disc with duplication purposes that put them in the warehouse and developed some relationships with US slash Chinese suppliers, bought floppy discs by the container. And I always had this inventory. And as people went out of the business, it actually became hard. I mean, for example, today, if you wanted to,

5:21if you said, hey, I need a king pack of blank floppy discs for some purpose, you're at the work of floppy disc or to do it as a joke gift or to give away as a wedding favor or whatever you might want to do, might probably be hard for you to figure out. You know, you could, there's no story you can go to. You might be able to do it on eBay or Amazon, but guess who's back in for eBay? So I sort of think I'm kind of a last guy. I mean, I'd be happy to be corrected, but over the course of the last 10 years, I said, you know, I'm a last guy standing and nobody else is saying, no, you're not. And so here I am, you know, with my inventory continuing to sell blank floppy discs, I have eight inch discs back in the day when rooms were filled, you know, a computer filled room and a bunch of guys with white shirts and enties wander around.

6:25And I have five and a quarter inch discs 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 updated 1.2 megabyte high density discs. I have myself green and half inch discs. I sell drives. So there's this whole sort of little, um, the spoke crazy little industry I have. I've cornered, you know, it's great to corner them. I should have cornered a larger one though. Yeah, yeah. Well, you've cornered one more market than I have. So, you know, I'll give you that. If I'm right, was it 2011 when Sony stopped manufacturing new discs? Is that correct?

7:25You know, I really don't know what the dates were because I never bought from Sony, I bought directly from automation, which probably didn't. And you know, with so many, you know, you know, you could have a Sony disc or a Mac cell disc or, you know, not a lot. And they're all made by the same factories in China. Right. And private labels and dislabeled and all of that stuff. But we don't have manufacturers making new ones anymore, right? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm aware of. I mean, you could probably, you know, people say, well, you know, you know, you know, people are still making CV. How much harder is it to make a floppy disc in a CD? Well, if you know about CD, man, and one thing I sort of left out of my history is that I'm when I moved when I started this floppy disc business. And then I thought the floppy disc business is going to go away. And I shifted to a CD and DVD duplication service. And for two decades,

8:30all of my revenue was from CD, these floppy disc were just sort of in, you know, sort of there in a warehouse and wherever somebody wanted some, you know, I sold some. It was never a significant portion of my revenue. And then, but people say, well, you know, if you know, people could still make CDs and DVDs, why, you know, it should be able to make a floppy. Well, just stop and think about it for a second. When you make a CD, you have this big machine, there are thousands of machines around the world. You pour chemicals in one and, you know, and the chemical chemicals go into the big machine and there's this big breath. 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 disc, you probably have 11 pieces. You know, you have the plastic shell, you have the metal shutter, you have a little spring

9:35in there. You 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 disc. I mean, and, you know, it feels story. You know, if you're 90% of the way there, you're not even halfway done. There's one piece of the 11 pieces, there's 12 pieces of 13 pieces that you need. You're not there. You can't do it. Yeah. Now, I've been told that, you know, you mentioned Sony. I think it was in Japan. There were two companies that made the magic cookie, which is the magnetic media sheet. Nobody makes that anymore. Got you. Manufacturers that. And you know, they manufacture the material, nobody cuts it and seals it and acts it. So that's all gone. And it's been gone for a long, long time.

10:41Now, I know you do some recycling of floppy discs 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 chat GPT 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, chat GPT work can gather team feedback from Slack and use it to suggest updates to a project brief in Google Docs. You stay in control, reviewing the draft, and deciding what moves forward. Put chat GPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on plus and pro plans. Being a serious business owner takes hard work, patience, and a drive to keep moving forward.

11:46So it's important to find a serious business card that goes the extra mile. With the Venture X Business Card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase, and with big purchasing power, you can spend more and earn more. This is your sign to take your business to the next level. The Capital One Venture X Business Card, what's in your wallet? Terms apply, see CapitalOne.com for details. Support comes from wise. The smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe. Fed up with losing out to hidden fees when you send money abroad with your everyday bank, choose the smart way. Wise. You can count on the exchange rate you'd usually find on Google. No unwelcome surprises. Plus, ditch that where's my money feeling? Most transfers arrive in under 20 seconds. Join millions, saving billions on hidden fees. Be smart, get wise, download the Wise app today. Teas and Cs apply. Meet Amazon Ads Rising Star Darryl Spencer, who set out to redefine men's self-care with his brand Crown Skin. Amazon Ads helped him grow.

12:47I walked away from Big Tech to build a luxury brand, in a category that no one was planning attention to, with the help of Amazon Ads, unreaching relevant audiences, and competing with the biggest names and men's grooming. We've scaled to over $500,000 in monthly revenue. Watch Crown Skin's story at advertising.amazon.com slash Rising Dash Stars. Harvard Business School Executive Education delivers a world-class learning experience that energizes aspiring and established change makers. Prepare for the next elevation for your organization and for yourself. Learn more at hbs.me slash breakthrough. That's hbs.me slash breakthrough. How 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, we call it NOS,

13:54new old stock used. I won't get to you with you, but people say, well, I want to discuss the manufacturer recently. I said, well, no, you don't. What do you mean? What do you mean? I said, well, when they first made the first million floppy disks or figuring out how to do that. And then they made 50 billion floppy disks and they knew exactly how to do it. They were very sophisticated and big industrial processors. When you've got a turning of windows, Microsoft on 31 disks, 36 disks, each one had to work. Yeah, I remember that. In the meat of that time, in the fat part of that time,

14:54they really knew what they're doing. They're producing fantastic disks. And then, as it moved from being high-end manufacturing to a 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. So if you, if somebody said, hey, hey, I need a floppy disk and it's got to work. It just has to work. And I have choice between when it was made in the last year manufacturing, the one that was made in the middle of the manufacturing, what to fight. I don't know, 1999, 1995, 2000. I picked that one all day long. And just to add one more aspect to this,

15:57people say, well, hasn't U.M. White has an USB replaced all this stuff. The answer is, I know what your experience is. My experience is USB is not that great. If I had a bet my life on whether or not data had been stored and quit these retrievable, and you gave me a 1995 floppy disk that was in somebody's destroyer, not on somebody's car dash board at 130 degrees. But, you know, kept in a reasonably temperate environment. My chance to get information off a floppy disk is 95, 98, 99 percent. No problem. The chance of getting off from the USB is the crapshoots. Yeah, that's right. 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. It needs that, that reliability. I know you gave us some interviews around four years ago saying that you had probably about four

17:00years of inventory left. How close are you to that prediction being correct? Better than I'd like. I would see, you know, every day stuff comes in, stuff goes out. People, people sell me small lots of floppy disks. I went to my back, but I was cleaning out my house. I found 200 floppy disks, where you buy them for me. Yes, I will, but not, you know, not going to be that big of a show. Yeah, yeah. Shippy is going to be a big deal. What is a great day? I'm, 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 from down to Alex. Yeah, yeah. And we're taking him to the dump. Will you take him off our hand? That's great. Yeah. That's a red letter. That's a great day. Right? That doesn't, that hasn't happened to me in a long time. But I, you know, it's kind of like a last scene for

18:02raiders of a walk start. Remember, there's that warehouse that goes back. I assure you that there's, there's a million floppy disks in warehouses somewhere. You just don't know. Yeah. Are you going to go either of me or to the dump in terms of existing inventory? I would say, you know, I'm pretty close to ride. I'd say that I have six months of inventory, but it comes in every day, a little goes out every day hard to say, 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 disks, you retire? Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, we have a few other, you know, kind of businesses that we do, we still do some, some duplication work here, some, and that's a high margin good job for us. We have a, what we call our floppy disk transversors, where somebody finds a floppy disk,

19:08a five and a quarter of a floppy disk, or a three and a half inch floppy disk with data on it, they want could be there an old address book or the grandmother's will or some or photographs that they took with one of those old floppy disk cameras. And then we'll pull the data off of there and send it to them on one of those irresponsible USB drives. 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 and it'll move out of, you know, my, out of my warehouse into probably into my garage and then I'm going to go have in the next 12 months. Yeah. 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 disk. Who are your current customers for for floppy disks that they're going to use to write to? Yeah, we have a

20:09variety, you know, you have the classic hobbyist of people who are into into computers and they'll want a lot of floppy disks for that. We have some business people who have a, if it don't, it ain't broke, don't fix it. Yeah, view of the world. Those are people like court reporters, you have those machine, you know, typing those stenographic machines that have floppy disks. We 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, uh, customer. We have, uh, you know, in, in the US, you know, most of the airplanes will fly or, you know, five or ten years old and got too much older than that. But out there, you know, in the third world, there are plenty of old

21:11airplanes. I would say maybe a third of the airplanes that are in commercial service now, maybe not a third, maybe a quarter, we're built 20 years ago. And if you had, if you wanted to tell the airplane, you know, where the runway was, you know, where the particular airport or if you have some special, there's some adionics that record how close you come to mountain peaks and other types of things. And you wanted to get that information in and out of the airplane, you do it with a floppy disk. And the airplane is still flying, the airplane is still good, the engines are still good, you know, and the floppy disk is 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 this, you know, use floppy disk, we'll clean them up and we'll try to, we'll try to resell them. But it's part of that process,

22:15we'll get a fall out of the X number that we'll fail to reform at. Or just in bad condition. And there's quite an active, I call, you know, artist and promotional kind of world. Well, people, if you can look at our website, floppygis.com, there's some examples of art that's done with floppy disks. Sounds ridiculous, but the stuff is gorgeous. I 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 the process. Yeah, that's why. Then we have other kinds of goofy ideas where people have IT conferences. And instead of having a name badge that they would, you know, clip onto their, I was going to say, there's sheep shows you how alive clip onto their, I'm ready. Yeah, yeah, to identify themselves. You just put a

23:22lanyard through one of the holes in the 3.5 inch floppy disk and we printed the, all of the conflict information and the name of the attendee on that, it becomes their, it becomes their ticket. 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 field you want to go in this, in this chapter. There's something magical about floppy disks that people have a connection and remember. Being a serious business owner takes hard work, patience, and a drive to keep moving forward. So it's important to find a serious business card that goes the extra mile. With the Venturex Business Card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase and with big purchasing power, you can spend more and earn more. This is your sign to take your business to the next level. The Capital One Venturex Business Card, what's in your wallet? Terms apply, see CapitalOne.com for details. Think of a toilet as just an everyday object. Your entire

24:25perspective shifts the moment you experience a collar smart toilet. Design changes everything, transforming a basic routine into something extraordinary. With standout aesthetics and intuitive controls, these are functional works of art, stunning design that never sacrifices performance. Enjoy customizable features for elevated comfort and convenience. It's more than a fixture. It's a cleaner routine and a more refined space. Experience the difference of collar smart toilets. Find more at collar.com. Yeah, I think so. In fact, I'm wondering if it's, is it, do you think it's too early to write the obituary of the floppy disk? Yes, I mean, there's an old joke, it's not my joke of, you know, the father has his little girl run in and say, daddy, daddy, look what I found.

25:27And she holds up a floppy disk. And the dad says, you know what that is? She says, yeah, somebody 3D printed the save icon. There's something, you know, I have a crazy view of this. I think floppy disks represent the last time when you were a stop loss. And what I mean by that is that, you know, back in the day when 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, you want to share a spreadsheet, you put it on the floppy disk, you used what we affectionately used to call this necronet, I don't know what words it's for those who do. So you necronet, it over to somebody else or you make a copy of it and it used to be ads saying don't copy that floppy,

26:30because that was a huge copyright violent. 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 an Iceland, 4% of it's in Santhiago, Chile. Yeah. 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 10 of human understanding was consistent and we were gone out the top. 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 and I had one of those little caddies, right? And you'd flip through it. Do you find the one you need? I even had an IBM

27:31disk valet, a little like fancy album that you open them up. But even with 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 it was never as personal. You never put it in your shirt pocket and took it home. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And there's just something about sort of understanding where your stuff was. That was very it was very comfort was because it was it was within normal understanding. Now now we don't now we don't have that. And I think it's just quieting for people and that floppy disk. There's nobody seems to floppy just without like grit. You know, whenever somebody comes in my office and they see one of them, you know, for the first time, like there's a grin. You know, nobody, nobody rounds and says, oh that absolutely.

28:32Yeah. Yeah. And they say, oh I remember when I was 11. Well, and when when people see the eight inch ones, I probably they probably their eyes bug. Yeah. Well, I think they think they're they think they're owning. Yeah. They're a doll for you. Yeah. Well, Tom Persney, 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. I love that. That is fantastic. If people need the transfer service or the duplication service or some 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. It's hard to remember floppy disk.com.

29:32Yeah, disk with a K folks. It's a K. Yeah. Yeah. 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. Just a no. One of the reasons that I ended up talking to Tom was for an article I'm writing for a magazine called Geeser on the reported death of the floppy disk and it's a parent exaggeration. So look for that in the November issue of Geeser 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. The DTS Family of Podcasts helping each other understand.

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