Meet Tom Persky, the "last man standing in the floppy disk business." His business, after decades of success as an industrial duplicator, "is now 90% selling blank floppy disks."
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.
It appears no-one is manufacturing them anymore, but Persky (among others) saw it coming and has considerable deadstock at hand—though he has recently fielded an order he could not fulfill. Perhaps some ancient equipment in a Sony factory basement might have to be dusted off soon.
I would say my last buy from a manufacturer was about ten or twelve years ago. Back then I made the decision to buy a large quantity, a couple of million disks, and we've basically been living off of that inventory ever since.
Sad reminder: the medium was always rough (especially if you were using them on an Amiga!) and the failure rate of the remaining inventory is high.
Well, people mostly buy disks for art projects, not really for building applications. Every once in a while, I'll get a game company that wants to rerelease an old game, but I would say that most of it is for art or for promotions. One of the things that I've seen a lot is the use of floppy disks as badges at conferences. We sold a lot of disks for that, especially the recycled disks that couldn't be reformatted. There is a fallout of about 30%, so we have large amounts of disks that we consider to be unusable.
The last person standing in the floppy disk business [aiga.org]
