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

Tom Merritt (0:08)

Welcome to the DTNS Weekend Edition, gratefully 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 disks. Yeah, you heard me right, floppy disks.

And these are new to, 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.

Tom Persky (0:37)

Happy to do it.

Tom Merritt (0:38)

So, describe a little bit about what you do. What is floppydisk.com?

Tom Persky (0:46)

Well, I guess floppydisk.com is sort of a last man standing organization that sells and duplicates and transfers floppydisk 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 purchase a large quantity of our software. And back in those days, in the 1990s, we distributed software on floppy disks. And we went out and had a 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 house. And as part of our regular software business, there 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 disk, the answer would have been, that's insane. No way. What could happen? Why? Well, because you could go to the drug store in the corner and buy a floppy disk. Go to Egghead Software and buy a floppy disk. Go to Prompt USA and buy a floppy disk. Some little guy in the corner would never sell a floppy disk. We could never compete on shelf space or advertising or pricing or anything else. And here I am, one of those 30 years later, and people say, well, why are you still in a floppy disk business? And why are you showing blank floppy disks? The answer is, I forgot to get out of the business. I mean, I bought all these disks for duplication purposes, I put them in a warehouse, I developed some relationships with US slash Chinese suppliers, bought floppy disks 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 said, hey, I need a 10 pack of blank floppy disks for some purpose, either to work with floppy disks or to do it as a joke gift or to give away as a wedding favor, or whatever you might want to do, it might probably be hard for you to figure out. There's no store you can go to. You might be able to do it on eBay or Amazon, but guess who's the back end for eBay and Amazon? That would be me. So I think I'm a last guy. I'd be happy to be corrected, but over the course of the last 10 years, I said, I'm a last guy standing, and nobody else would say, no, you're not.

And so here I am with my inventory continuing to sell blank floppy disks. I have 8-inch disks back in the day when rooms were filled, you know, a computer filled with room, and a bunch of guys with white shirts and thin ties wandered around. And I have 5-1⁄4-inch disks, and actually the older 5-1⁄4-inch disks, which are like 500K or IBM format 360K, those are more valuable than the updated 1.2-megabyte high-density disk. I have myself 3-1⁄2-inch disks, I sell drives, you know, so there's this whole sort of little, bespoke, crazy little industry I have. I've cornered, you know, it's great to corner a market. I shouldn't corner the larger one, though.

Tom Merritt (5:09)

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 disks? Is that correct?

Tom Persky (5:27)

You know, I really don't know what the dates were because I never bought from Sony. I bought directly from I-Nation, which probably didn't, you know, with so many, you know, you could have a Sony disk or a Maxell disk or, you know, God knows what, and they're all made by the same factories in China.

Tom Merritt (5:49)

Right.

Tom Persky (5:49)

And private labels and dis-labels and all of that stuff.