Ladies, gentleman and cyber geeks; the humble 3 and a half inch floppy is no more.
In a move that will shock few and actually affect even fewer, Sony have revealed their intentions to cease production and sales of the aged storage format in Japan, effectively calling time on the floppy’s very existence. With Sony – the last major manufacturer of the 3.5″ wonder – all set to pull the trigger in March 2011, the firm’s decision to drop support for the now 30 year old diskette should officially consign the floppy to the history books. Presumably, the days of the storage-based pun will also go with it, unless somebody can think of a way to relate USB external drives or Blu-Ray to underperforming male genitalia.
Personally, I can’t remember the last time a 3 inch floppy perked my interests in terms of actual use, but I must admit that a tiny part of my inner geek died upon hearing this news. Flicking through box after box of different colored diskettes, constantly worrying about sliding across the metal bit and wiping it’s pitiful memory, was an integral part of my early computing experience. I now officially feel old.
What may surprise you more than the actual news of the floppy’s demise is the fact that Sony actually sold 12 million of them during 2009 in Japan. It’s a crazy world we live in, folks.
Email the author of this post at matc@tap-repeatedly.com.
The company I work for, our former Chairman of the Board invented the floppy disk back in The Past. Dick Morley is his name.
I admit, despite not having used one in… at least three years, it still freaks me out a little to have a computer without a 3.5″ drive. What if I need a Windows 98 bootable with CD drivers?
3.5″? I remember 8″ disks. And 5.25″. And the first CD. Which gave way to the DVD. What’s odd is that a 30 year history can seem like a moment and the eras collapse into the blink of an eye.
I remember going to a computer store with my father-in-law and watching his face when he was told that they didn’t sell 5.25″ disks anymore. It struck him like a blow. He had made the transition to computers but couldn’t handle the transition between generations of computers.
Like the song in Fiddler on the Roof, there are some changes which are just too much.
3.5″ is no use to any woman!! 🙂
I remember the bags of floppy discs me and Lew had for our Amiga and the many scrawled on, half peeling off labels. Remember those read/write plastic bits in the top corner? I already miss those little 1.44mb slices of nostaligia.
The weird thing is 3.5″ floppy discs really weren’t floppy at all.
I actually still have a shoe box full of 3.5″ disks. What the heck am I going to do with them all?!
Sell them on eBay!
I think the best thing we can do with old, funny technologies (8-tracks are not included: there is nothing funny about the abomination that was the 8-track) is bury them in our yards, left to be discovered by aliens or yet-to-be-evolved sentient terrestrial life.
One day they could recreate the technology required to read the alien devices and learn something about us.
So obviously what I’m saying is before you bury your floppy disks put weird shit on them like clown pictures or some Vera Lynn songs.
The recycle police would find & fine me if I buried those disks. Or at the very least, charge a tax just in case I’m thinking of not disposing of them properly.
I was in school when we started converting from 5.25’s to 3.5’s. We used to collect as many viruses (virii?) as we could on those disks at school. Ahh, the good ol’ days.
I have a bunch of those plastic 3.5 floppy boxes with maybe 150 disks. Ancient text games like Thermonuclear War, really bad sci-fi short stories I wrote a zillion years ago, pirated WordPerfect programs. I like xtal’s idea of filling them with nonsense (not that they aren’t already…) and then burying them. But think outside your yard. Think in traffic dividers, college campus party spots, near Steerpike’s workplace. Just a few of the many options available to us.
I remember taking a drill and giving my single sided 3.5 Discs lobotomies in order to make them double sided. 🙂
I still have boxes of 5 1/4″ discs for my aging Commodore 64. They’re still sealed up and ready to be notched. 😉
Ha ha ha, double-siding your disks, I remember that Hanover!
We used a hole puncher for the 5 1/4s”. I don’t think I ever even saw a 3.5″ until my Dad upgraded to a Mac Classic when I was ten or so.
My granma regularly uses floppy discs, she will be disappointed.
Dang, and here I still have quite a few old games that came on 3.5″ I still need to (try to) install and play. Better get on that!