Bye Bye Floppy

Story shown originally on Talknerdytomelover.com


Sony announced today that they would end shipments of 3.5" floppy disks in Japan in March of 2011, two years after ending worldwide shipments of what was once the most ubiquitous storage media on the planet.

If you went to school in the '80s or '90s, you remember carrying these stupid plastic squares around, flicking the little metal cover back and forth even though your teachers told you that would ruin the disk. And you remember using whatever utilities you could on your computer to somehow get that 2 MB file (it's HUGE!) to either fit on one of these 1.44 MB "high" density disks or span multiples of them.

The floppy's death spiral began in 1998, when Apple introduced the floppy-less iMac, while CD burners began to become widely available. I think the last time I used one was in 2004, when I needed to pull an old college paper off a floppy. I had to dig a USB floppy drive out of storage just to do that, since I got rid of my last computer with a built-in floppy drive in 2002.

So, with the floppy all-but-dead and buried, let's take a look back at some fun floppy facts:

- The 3.5" floppy disk was originally released by HP in 1982 and held 264 kB of data.
- The common 3.5" HD floppy disk was released in 1987, and had nearly completely replaced its 5.25" predecessor within 3 years.
- As larger storage media became popular, there were multiple attempts to extend the life of the floppy drive, including the LS-120 "SuperDisk" (God, remember that thing?)
- A pack of 40 3.5" floppy disks will cost you $24.99 at Amazon.com. That gets you about 58 MB of storage. For the same price, you can get an 8 GB flash drive from Amazon.com. That's nearly a 14000% increase in storage.
- A dual-layer Blu-ray Disc can hold 100 GB of information, or the equivalent of 69,444 floppy disks.