We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business
This is not the last manufacturer, by the way; it is not clear from the article how many manufacturers are left (it seems that there are still Chinese companies that carry out large orders for floppies, but the quality has fallen significantly in recent years). It is the owner of floppydisk.com. He’s got a lot of new floppies that he bought 10 years ago, plus he’s always getting junk floppies from people, including never unpacked. Interestingly, he also sells five-inch floppy diskettes, and even eight-inch floppy disks, for those monsters who really understand perversion.
There are many interesting things about who still need diskettes in our time (mainly industry, old machines, medical devices, planes, etc. but amateur restorers are also caught) about how his business works and how it has changed over the years. I did not realize that in terms of production, making a floppy disk much heavier than a CD or DVD: as it explains, once the technology is set up, making a CD or DVD is to pour plastic into one end of the machine, get disks from the other end; a floppy disk consists of 10 different parts, different materials (plastic, metal, spring, etc.), which must be accurately nailed to each other, automatic assembly requires serious quality control etc. etc.
Can it happen that interest grows again? – he thinks it won’t be like a record, it’ll be like a typewriter: amateurs and connoisseurs will still be there, but there will be no mass production.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the HN comments, especially when people start remembering how we’re all in the ’80s and ’90s dicks… sorry, we used to enjoy floppy disks, and I have a light bulb in my head, too, yeah, yeah! Do you remember how the heart of the heart, when it heard the characteristic grinding of the disk drive, which meant that it was the same sector reading, trying to overcome the reading error? Remember how it was, install Linux with 38 floppies, and the 23rd is not readable? Remember the stickers and boxes and program-directories? Remember that sound that the three-inch came in the floppy disk: The Kychuk! Remember?
