All of this may leave the modern reader wondering: What is a floppy disk?

An artifact from a time when “the world was not wired,” according to Tom Persky, who inventories and sells floppy disks at what may be one of the largest such companies left, FloppyDisk.com.

Back then, if you wanted to get information like software onto a computer or a large device, you had to put it on a floppy disk, insert the disk into the machine, and then direct the machine to access the information.

“There was nowhere to log in to,” Mr. Persky said in an interview. “There was no logging in and downloading software or data updates or anything like that.”

In a nod to the fact that some readers, even of dry government reports, may not know what a floppy disk is, the Government Accountability Office provided a photograph of two disks along with a summary of their place in the pantheon of information technology.

“Introduced in the 1970s, the eight-inch floppy disk is a disk-based storage medium that holds 80 kilobytes of data,” it said in its report. “In comparison, a single modern flash drive can contain data from the equivalent of more than 3.2 million floppy disks.”

According to Mr. Persky, whose inventory contains more than 500,000 floppy disks, the disks are more widely used than one might expect, especially in industrial machines, aircraft, medical devices and complex hardware systems like those used by the world’s militaries. He said he thought it had been roughly five years since anyone had manufactured a new disk.

“A big industrial machine that is designed to last 30, 40 or 50 years and in fact does last 30, 40 or 50 years — do you throw it away because there is a new way to get information onto the machine?” he said. “The question is, What is the cost of using the floppy disk as opposed to the cost of transitioning to something else like a USB drive or linking to the internet?”