Communications of the ACM
Why the Floppy Disk Just Won't Die
Most of the companies still using floppy disks are small businesses or companies running tight margins who either simply never got around to upgrading their equipment, or found it too expensive to do so.
Credit: Javier Zayas Photography/Getty Images
When Mark Necaise got down to his last four floppy disks at a rodeo in Mississippi in February, he started to worry.
Necaise travels to horse shows around the state, offering custom embroidery on jackets and vests: "All of the winners would get a jacket and we'd put the name of the farm or the name of the horse or whatever on it," he says.
Five years ago, he paid $18,000 for a second-hand machine, manufactured in 2004 by the Japanese embroidery equipment specialist Tajima. The only way to transfer the designs from his computer to the machine was via floppy disk.
"We started with eight disks, but four of them stopped working, which made me very uneasy," he says. "I tried reformatting them in order to get them to work properly, but it didn't work. I was concerned I wouldn't be able to continue with the embroidery."
Back when Necaise's Tajima machine was made, floppy disks were still in mass production—and were particularly popular in Japan, where they were used for official government procedures until last year. Even though the last major manufacturer of floppy disks stopped making them in 2010, the machines that rely on them—from embroidery machines to plastic molding, medical equipment to aircraft—live on, relying on a dwindling supply of disks that will one day run out.
From Wired
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