We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business

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.

While putting together the manuscript for our new book, Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium, we met with Tom to discuss the current state of the floppy disk industry and the perks and challenges of running a business like his in the 2020s. What has changed in this era, and what remains the same?

This article hits close for me. The company I worked for until 2012 did software duplication and fulfilment work across all kinds of media. When I joined in 1993 that was various tape formats plus floppy disks, with one of my first jobs being to write software to do CD duplication using the first CD recorders from Philips. Over the subsequent two decades, most of the tape formats faded away and DVDs, Blu-Ray and USB drives would join the CD, but floppy disks were still being duplicated occasionally. I’m pretty sure that I read about the end of the last floppy disk production line shortly before I left, which concurs with the timeline given in the interview.