Farewell to the floppy disc

Ah memories...

You may not have used one for the best part of 15 years, but apparently there's been enough demand for them for Sony to still be making them... until today. Almost 30 years after they were first introduced, Sony has said it is to stop making the floppy disc.

The 3.5in (9cm) disks were first introduced in 1981 and throughout the 90s, became the ideal work to transfer files from one computer to another.. as long as the combined size of the files didn't exceeded 1.4 MB.

Of course, today you can get one terabyte memory sticks, and even this writer's phone has a 1GB memory card in it - and it's 50x smaller than a floppy disc, so the floppy's end was always nigh. However talking to people about its demise triggered responses of "I thought they'd stopped making them a long time ago."

The end of an era

Sony have stated that they will stops sales of the disks in most international markets due to (unsurprisingly) "dwindling demand and competition from other storage formats."

That is quite the understatement.

The BBC even believes that the fall of the almighty floppy started 12 years ago in 1998, when Apple decided to not include a floppy drive in its G3 iMac computer. Other firms soon followed suit and soon the floppy drive was but a distant memory. Dell, for example, stopped support floppy discs in 2003 and most computer stores outlets stopped selling them in 2007.

Sony however, have clung to nostalgia and continued to sell and shop them in their millions. To whom remains a mystery...

However, in this time of cloud storage and portable USB sticks the end of the floppy has come and Sony has embraced the inevitable. Sales will officially stop in March 2011.

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Timon Singh

Timon Singh is a graduate of Liverpool University where he received a degree in Social and Economic History. He has previously worked for BBC Magazines on BBC Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, the publication for the popular genealogy show.

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