Time to get nostalgic. Shed a tear - we won't judge you for it.

Floppy disks terminated after Sony stops production.

Floppy disks, which once littered home offices around the country are finally heading to the great electronics scrapyard in the sky.

Sony, the largest manufacturer of the 3.5" storage devices, have announced they will stop making them in March next year - 30 years after they started selling them.

They made the decision after domestic disk sales in Japan crashed from 47million in 2002 to 12 million in 2009. Sony had already withdrawn them from many international markets.

First launched by IBM in 1971, floppy disks were an unwieldy eight inches across and could only hold 80KB of information - a tiny fraction of one megabyte.

They developed alongside the burgeoning home computer market. By the early eighties they had reduced in size to 5.25 inches and held 720KB. Sony claims to have sold the first 3.5inch floppy in 1981.

The popularity of USB flash drives, CDs and other storage devices have now made the floppy disk obsolete. The maximum storage of a floppy is two megabytes, which is 4,000 times less than the eight gigabytes customers can buy on a USB stick.

It has been a long drawn out death for the home office friend. In 2003, Dell stopped including floppy drives on their standard home computers. By 2007 PC World had also stopped selling the disks.

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davemc said:

Wait, you mean stiffies right?

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Flashback to 1994: This pilot fish works at a company that does military projects, and his program manager comes back from an IT conference with a nifty new gadget.

"It's a thing that punches a hole in the corner of a double-density floppy disk so you can format it as high-density," says fish. "The program manager crows about how much money we can save using it -- about 10 cents per disk -- and makes a big presentation at the quarterly review for the executive VP.

"I casually ask if he understands the difference in how the disks are manufactured, using the analogy about raking sand versus raking gravel. He snarkily replies that it doesn't matter because the cost benefits outweigh that.

"So I ask if he is willing to risk storing the mission critical software we are developing for the military on a bootleg formatted disk to save ten cents. VP asks me what the worst-case scenario is.

"I tell him, 'Worst case is a bunch of soldiers standing in front of a launcher with a screen saying Disk not formatted while enemy missiles rain down around them.'

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kayvee said:

What about installing Windows 95 from 32 stiffies, and you got to number 27 and it went click, click, click.... just before you threw it out the window and went in search of another #27. Fun indeed.

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kayvee said:

What about installing Windows 95 from 32 stiffies, and you got to number 27 and it went click, click, click.... just before you threw it out the window and went in search of another #27. Fun indeed.

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ponder said:

Not much has changed since the 8088, all PC's today are based the same kuk architecture (more or less). I blame IBM, Intel & MS for the crap computers we have today. Things could have been much better if it was not for this legacy.

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