Perkins was in the business of duplicating floppy disks. I didn't think I'd ever sell blank disks. It was as good as printing money to Duplicate disks in the 1980's and early 1990's. It was making a lot of money. Over the course of time, I began to sell blank copies. If you want to buy them, you can go to any office supply store or computer store. When you could purchase disks off the shelf, why would you try to find me? People came to us when these larger companies stopped carrying them. I'm a small company with a floppy disk inventory and I'm able to be a worldwide supplier of this product. My business used to be a lot of CD and DVD duplicating, but now only sells blank disks. I'm shocked by it.
Q: Where does this focus on floppy disks come from? Why not work with another medium...?
Perkins says that he forgot to get out of the business and that's why he's into floppy disks. Everyone in the world thought that this was a dying industry. I thought I'd keep this revenue stream because I'd already bought everything. I didn't attempt to expand. The number of floppy users has fallen over time. The number of people who gave the product went down even more quickly. There is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business and that man is me.
We've been living off of the inventory since I decided to buy a lot of disks. We get a lot of lucky times. Two years ago, a guy called me and said that he wanted his grandpa's garage to be free of junk. Are you going to accept it? I wanted to remove it from his hand. We negotiated a fair price. He didn't specify what he wanted, but he got an empty garage and a sum of cash. Around 50,000 floppy disks is a good deal.
In the interview Perkins reveals he has around half a million floppy disks in stock — 3.5-inch, 5.25-inch, 8-inch, "and some rather rare diskettes. Another thing that happened organically was the start of our floppy disk recycling service. We give people the opportunity to send us floppy disks and we recycle them, rather than put them into a landfill. The sheer volume of floppy disks we get in has really surprised me, it's sometimes a 1,000 disks a day." But he also estimates its use is more widespread than we realize. "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. There's also medical equipment, which requires floppy disks to get the information in and out of medical devices.... " And in the end he seems to have a genuine affection for floppy disk technology. "There's this joke in which a three-year-old little girl comes to her father holding a floppy disk in her hand. She says: 'Daddy, Daddy, somebody 3D-printed the save icon.' The floppy disks will be an icon forever."There is an excerpt from a book called Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium.
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