Mobile
Sony’s Saying Goodbye to Floppy Discs
Sony’s going to stop producing 3.5″ floppy discs next year, putting an end to a 30-year era of storage in 1.44MB chunks. I still remember the first time a neighbor showed me one of these things, which seemed so high tech compared to the 5 1/4″ floppies that we used with our Commodore 64. As a young computer geek I didn’t understand why everyone called them floppy (they are hard on the inside), until I broke one open and saw that the disc itself was indeed floppy. And of course I remember the Iomega Zip cartridge ads that proclaimed they had 70 times the capacity of the lowly floppy.
I thought we said goodbye to floppy discs a long time ago when PC manufacturers switched over to CD burners, but I was wrong.
via CrunchGear
Gavin Miller
04/26/2010 at 2:42 pm
Ah yes, 100 and 250Mb Zip disks. Click, click, click…..
At Uni I would buy their subsidised 720k double density disks for use in my Atari ST. :-)
Xavier Lanier
04/26/2010 at 3:33 pm
100MB ZIP Drives- I remember when I got one and I felt like I had all the mobile storage capacity one could ever hope for. If memory serves me correctly, it cost about $20 per 100MB disc.
Eric
04/26/2010 at 5:42 pm
This comes on the heels of my purchase of a 32GB thumb drive. I, too, had a Zip Drive and still have many of the discs…and a way to read them. But, the question for Sony is, “Why did it take so long to stop making these dics?”
Gavin Miller
04/27/2010 at 3:22 am
There was still the demand for them. 12 million were sold in Japan last year!
HG
04/26/2010 at 6:54 pm
Yes what took so long for Sony to stop making these floppies
SAM
04/27/2010 at 10:19 am
We still use floppies.
Many industrial machines still read from floppy discs.
Our computerized embroidery machines read floppy’s
and our CAD cutting machine runs from a floppy.
A newer machine runs via USB network.
To upgrade them to another format is costly. Networking
all of them is impracticle.
Need to go stock up on floppies…LOL