FOR anyone over the age of 40 and familiar with computers, floppy disks were a fact of life until what feels like relatively recently. For those younger than 40, a floppy disk was the transportable storage medium that was in vogue from the 1970s till the late 90s.
If that still isn't ringing any bells, an image of it is used as the "save" icon for many programs and apps. They were composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium encased in a square or nearly-square plastic enclosure.
The disks would be spun in its enclosure and read by a magnetic head. They were horribly slow compared to modern storage such as SSDs or thumbdrives, but they were cheap, easy to make and easily transportable.
Seeing how archaic the medium is compared to anything we use today, it'd be fair to think that they've completely fallen out of use, but is it true floppies are still commonly used in many industries?
Verdict:
TRUE
Yes, floppy disks are still in use. You'd think in this day and age they would have gone the way of the dinosaur, but you'd be surprised.
Unlike computers and tech, change does not happen at breakneck speeds in many industries.
Surprising as it might seem, floppy disks still are used in the aviation industry.
The use of floppy disks in aviation is not very surprising when you think about it when you consider many airplanes that are still in use such as the Airbus A320 were introduced in the late 1980s.
Technicians need to use floppy disks for software loading and data transfer with these older planes.
Older medical equipment also requires the use of floppy disks to move data around and update their software.
Until 2019, the US still used floppy disks to store codes for their nuclear arsenal though they have since modernised their computers and thus ditched the floppy.
In fact, the last company that sold brand new floppy disks – Sony - shut down production in 2011.
Saying that, the use of floppy disks may never truly die out.
Indeed, University of Colorado Boulder professor Lori Emerson told tech portal Wired.com that she found it hard to believe that it would ever disappear.
"There are people in the world who are still busy finding and fixing up and maintaining phonograph players from 1910," she said, never mind something as relatively recent as floppy disks.
It is estimated that during its peak, something like five billion floppy disks were made per year in the 1990s.
This means that there are still a lot of disks out there, though mostly at the bottom of many dusty desk drawers and filing cabinets.
Tom Persky, who runs a site specialising on sourcing and selling floppies - Floppydisk.com, said the lifespan of some industrial machines that rely on floppies could be 20 to 30 years.
Persky told Wired.com that he sold about 1,000 disks a day from his California warehouse. He said he used to buy a disk for as little as $0.07 each, but nowadays he sells the most common type, the 3 1/2 inch, for US$1 a piece.
"There’s a worldwide inventory of disks that were manufactured 10, 20 or 30 years ago," Persky said.
"That inventory is fixed. We’re just blowing through it day by day. I really have no idea how big it is. It’s probably unbelievably huge, but dispersed. There isn’t anybody with half a million disks, but there are half a million people with a 10-pack,” he added.
References:
1. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/why-the-floppy-disk-just-wont-die
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html
3. https://travelradar.aero/the-importance-floppy-disks-aviation/
4. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2756935/sony-to-end-floppy-disk-production.html
5. https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/floppy/
