Floppy disks are portable storage media used for multiple recording and storage of data. Although that they are a relic from another time, at least one industry is still interested in such storage devices, says Tom Persky, who considers himself “the last man left in the floppy disk business,” reports Insider.

Persky is the founder of floppydisk.com, a project that sells and recycles floppy disks. The man says the airline industry is one of his biggest customers. This is known from the book published last week by Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar The Floppy Disk Fever: Curious Afterlifes of a Flexible Medium.

“My biggest customers — and where most of the money comes from — are industrial users,” Persky said in an interview for the book. “These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information into and out of a machine. Imagine it’s 1990 and you’re building a large industrial machine of one type or another. You’re designing it to last 50 years, and you want to use the best technology available.”

Persky adds: “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 notes that floppy disks are still used in medicine. And then there are “hobbyists” who want to “buy 10, 20 or maybe 50 floppy disks”.

Floppy disks themselves recently hit the news when Japanese Minister of Digital Technology Taro Kano promised to repeal laws that require the use of floppy disks and CDs when sending data to a country’s government.