Floppy disks are still not "completely extinct", and airlines are still big customers.

CTOnews.com popular in the 1980s and 1990s as ancient storage devices, have long since faded from the eyes of ordinary computer users, but some industries are still interested in such storage devices.

Tom Persky, founder of floppydisk.com, a Web site that sells and recycles floppy disks, calls the aviation industry one of his biggest customers in his new book, Floppy Fever. Persky regularly repairs, recycles, and sells floppy disks to customers who still rely on the old technology, and even its website remains styled from the 1990s to the early 2000s.

"My biggest customers, and the source of most of my revenue, are industrial users," Persky said in an interview last week. Imagine it's 1990 and you're building a large industrial machine. You designed it to last 50 years, and you used the best technology. But who would have thought that the world would change so quickly? "

Persky added: "Take the aviation industry as an example. Perhaps half of the world's fleet today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some avionics. This is a huge consumer base for floppy disks. "

Diskettes are still being used by medical departments, and "hobbyists" occasionally buy dozens of them from the site, Persky said.

CTOnews.com has learned that floppy disks also made the most news last month after Japan's digital minister Taro Kono declared "war" on the device, tweeting earlier this month that Japan's digital agency would change rules requiring businesses to use floppy disks and CDs in favor of online services.