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Sony’s Saying Goodbye to Floppy Discs

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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

6 Comments

6 Comments

  1. 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.

  2. 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!

  3. HG

    04/26/2010 at 6:54 pm

    Yes what took so long for Sony to stop making these floppies

  4. 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

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