PLR has created a few basic models that can be configured to run on nearly 600 machines. Their list includes looms, stage lighting consoles, circuit board printers, oscilloscopes, digital printers, electrocardiographs, vector signal analyzers, injection molding machines, tube benders and pipes, cutting saws, wire cutters, plasma cutters, metal presses, sound samplers, musical instruments. such as pianos and keyboards, and computer floppy disk drives from Sony, Panasonic and NEC, as well as dozens of embroidery and CNC machines.
Most of them cost thousands of dollars, and some aren’t even that old, so owners will want to keep them as long as possible: “A lot of this equipment has never been upgraded to the USB, even when USB was predominant,” explains Pascal. “They are still struggling with floppy disk drives, especially embroidery machines. This has left a great opportunity in the market to improve these people.
People come to PLR for upgrades not only because they can’t find drives, but also because they can’t get replacement drives. “Even when we started selling these devices 12 years ago, floppy disk drives were getting hard to find, so I can’t imagine now,” says Paschal. Sales are down, but Paschal says the company still sells between 2,000 and 3,000 units a year.
The floppy disk may never truly die. “There are people around the world who are still busy finding, repairing and maintaining phonograph players from 1910, so it’s very hard for me to believe that floppy disks are going to disappear completely,” says Lori Emerson, professor at New York University. University of Colorado Boulder and founder of the Media Archeology Lab.
The lifespan of some industrial machines that rely on floppy disks can be 30 to 40 years, and many are only 20 years old, says Tom Persky, who runs Floppydisk.com, a site that specializes in sourcing and selling floppy disks. floppy disks in several countries. formats.
Persky sells about 1,000 drives a day, mostly 3.5-inch drives, many of them new, from a stock of hundreds of thousands in a California warehouse. He says 20 or 25 years ago he could buy a container of records for as little as $0.07 a piece. Today he sells the most common type, the 3.5-inch, for $1 each.
Supply constraints normally result in higher prices, but as this trend progresses, supply itself will become so limited that the economy will force more and more people to upgrade or replace their equipment, thus causing the market to collapse on itself.
At least one type of floppy disk, the old 8-inch floppy disk introduced by IBM in 1971, appears to be on the verge of extinction. “There are none left and we are selling the ones we have for $5 [each] in boxes of tens,” says Persky. As for the 3.5 inch floppy disk, he can’t say how many additional disks exist.
“There is a global stockpile of records made 10, 20, 30 years ago,” Persky says. “This inventory is fixed. We go through it day by day. I really have no idea how big it is. It’s probably incredibly huge, but scattered. No one owns half a million records, but half a million people own a 10-pack.”
Persky has no plans to wait for the singularity to happen. He is 73 years old and says he will only work for five more years. He doesn’t think there’s anyone “stupid” enough to take the business from him. “I’m 50 miles from the airport, on a plane, and I ran out of gas,” he says. “My job is to land the plane.”
