Musician Espen Kraft stores his sound samples on floppy disks, using them to make his music for their authentic sound
The sample is almost ready to play but not quite – it's the anticipation as it loads that sparks a certain nostalgia, what Kraft calls, "a nice, warm, cosy place". The idea is flowing now. He presses a key. His ears fill with sound. With the dawn of the 21st Century, however, for most computer users, floppy disks were on their way out – increasingly supplanted by writeable CDs and thumb drives. And now, cloud storage is ubiquitous. The most widely used type of floppy, with a maximum capacity of less than three megabytes, can hardly compete. Unless you are in love with them – and some people are.
If your floppy disks become corrupted, it is still possible to replace them so long as you have backed up your data. Tom Persky, a US businessman, has been selling "new", as in, unopened, floppy disks for years and still finds the trade lucrative. He runs, which offers disks for about US$1 each, though some higher capacity versions cost up to US$10 per disk, he says.
There are other reasons why some organisations have been reluctant to move away from using floppy disks. While there can be security risks when it comes to relying on old computer systems in the 21st Century, because antiquated and unpatched systems are in principle easier to hack, the physical nature of floppy disks also offers some protection.
Kraft adores floppy disks because they help him creatively, he says. He doesn't want to make music that merely apes 1980s styles – rather, he wants it to sound like it actually came from that decade. Demleitner lurks in online marketplaces and makes contact with people who have old computer systems for sale because, often, those systems come with a box of floppy disks. Typically, he and the seller arrange to meet in public for the handover. "Sometimes you get weird looks ," says Demleitner, recalling a recent exchange in a local café.
"Loading old games off a USB stick doesn't really give you that touch, that smell of what we experienced as kids," says Dyson. "When you're running games or software from a floppy disk, it makes it an occasion."The technology capable of reading floppy disks is increasingly hard to find – more common as museum pieces or gathering dust in attics