It has been 12 years since the iMac dropped support for the 3.5-inch floppy disk, a radical step at the time. Sony has finally decided to stop making the floppy disk due to lack of demand. The only surprise is that it has taken this long.
The 3.5-inch floppy, invented in 1981, provided a whopping 1.44MB of disk space so you could move files quickly between different computers. But don’t worry: Sony will keep the production lines running until March 2011, giving you a year to stockpile the disks. Apparently there are still people who buy them. Sony sold 12 million floppies in Japan during 2009. It will now join the cassette tape and the eight-track in fondly remembered obscurity.
It shows my age when I say that I can remember booting a computer from a floppy because the computer didn’t have a hard drive. Back then, the 1.44MB and 1,000 kbps transfer rate seemed bottomless and blistering compared to the cassette tapes they replaced.
