R.I.P. 3.5″ Floppy Disk

By John Farrier in Science & Tech on Apr 27, 2010 at 9:02 am

The Sony Corporation, which created the 3.5 inch floppy disk in 1981, will cease production of the format next year:

With the advent of CDs and later, DVDs, the use of the plastic floppys and its limited storage capacity were quickly deserted.

After the Apple G3, along with PCs, began shipping without the drives pre-installed the disks became virtually obsolete. However, the death of the format has only now become official with Sony’s decision. [...]

The 3.5 inch floppy was first introduced in 1981, and hit the height of its sales in 2000.

Link via Nerd Bastards | Photo: flickr user matsuyuki used under Creative Commons license

Previously on Neatorama: Floppy Disks at Art Medium

Tags: floppy disk

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Gauldar
Apr 27th, 2010 at 9:16 am
That’s interesting. I believe when I built my computer around the year 2000 that was the first time I never bought a new floppy drive, because I knew I would never use it. I pretty much used Iomega Zip disks during college, but once USB drives became cheap and internet bandwidth got better, I’ve abandoned them since then. Surprisingly, I never got into the usage of rewritable CDs like some of my friends did.
chrome
Apr 27th, 2010 at 9:47 am
People still used them in 2000?! I was onto CD’s by then. I never even bothered with zips. though I did buy a mini CD player *shame*.
Marshall
Apr 27th, 2010 at 11:21 am
haha grandpa storage…
kev
Apr 27th, 2010 at 11:28 am
Don’t worry, I have a stack of old AOL disks I can format if anyone needs them!
Splint Chesthair
Apr 27th, 2010 at 11:44 am
Pff, Zip Disk, I had a Jazz.
Gauldar
Apr 27th, 2010 at 1:29 pm
@kev

In highschool my friends and I had a name for those. Frisbee.
Flick
Apr 27th, 2010 at 1:46 pm
We still use 8″ floppies at my job. No joke.
emmakate
Apr 27th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
They still make those? I haven’t seen a computer that has an A: drive in years
Weef235
Apr 27th, 2010 at 4:31 pm
@flick
Are you running an old 36? (God forbid a 34).
Frau
Apr 27th, 2010 at 7:44 pm
Just last week, I sold a whole unopened box of DOUBLE sided ones. Obviously someone still uses them.

@ Chrome – hells yeah. How else are you gonna play the original Wolfenstein?
Ooo shareware memory.

@ Flick – You must use and IBM. At an old job, we had an IBM cash register that worked on those 8 inch disks.
Stuart McCracken
Apr 27th, 2010 at 8:06 pm
No amount nostalgia could make these damn things acceptable
Foreigner1
Apr 28th, 2010 at 12:37 am
R.I.P. 3.5″ ? Now there’s some nostalgia…
I still must have my stacks of WordPerfect 4.0 and DrDos 3.5 lying around somewhere. What was it? about 7 or 8 disks for one program? And there must be some disk with (how exiting for the young lad I was back then! ) early computerporn too- Mostly text and about 30 very low-quality pics on it because that was all that my computer with VGA-screen and without internet capacity could handle. Thas was back in 1988. I still have a floppy drive on my current home computer, but I haven’t used that in ages.
AntDude
Apr 28th, 2010 at 8:16 am
I still use 3.5″ floppy disks for boot disks and BIOS upgrades. :/
Ian McAlister
May 5th, 2010 at 10:33 am
Oddly, the jet that I fly that was designed around 2000 and built in 2005 uses 5×3.5″ floppies to update its navigational database MONTHLY. The cost to upgrade the system costs more than I paid for my last (used) car. Finding a computer to write the data to the disks is a royal pain.

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