Enlarge / Photograph taken in Florence, Italy (credit score: Daniele Ciabatti/EyeEm by way of Getty)

When Mark Necaise received right down to his final 4 floppy disks at a rodeo in Mississippi in February, he began to fret.

Necaise travels to horse reveals across the state, providing customized embroidery on jackets and vests: “All the winners would get a jacket and we’d put the title of the farm or the title of the horse or no matter on it,” he says.

5 years in the past, he paid $18,000 for a second-hand machine, manufactured in 2004 by the Japanese embroidery tools specialist Tajima. The one technique to switch the designs from his laptop to the machine was by way of floppy disk.