The 'last man' selling floppy-disks says airlines continue to make orders for the ancient storage technology

• Tom Persky, founder of floppydisk.com, sells and recycles the archaic storage devices.
• He says in a new book that the airline industry is one of his biggest customers.

The archaic floppy disk apparently isn't as obsolete as we thought in the US.

While they're a relic of another time, at least one industry is still interested in the storage devices, according to the person who claims to be "last man standing in the floppy disk business."

Tom Persky, the founder of floppydisk.com — which sells and recycles floppy disks — said that the airline industry is one of his biggest customers in the new book "Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium" by Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar.

"My biggest customers — and the place where most of the money comes from — are the industrial users," Persky said, in an interview from the book published online in Eye On Design last week. "These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it's 1990, and you're building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you'd want to use the best technology available."

Persky added: "Take the airline industry for example. Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That's a huge consumer."

He also said that the medical sector still uses floppy disks. And then there's "hobbyists," who want to "buy ten, 20, or maybe 50 floppy disks."

Floppy disks made news recently when Japan's digital minister, Taro Kano, declared "a war" on the devices, tweeting earlier this month that Japan's digital agency would change regulations requiring businesses to use floppy disks and CDs, instead shifting to online services.