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It’s official. The floppy’s days are numbered. Electronics giant Sony said this week that it would stop manufacturing the once ubiquitous storage medium likely by March of 2011.
Few will notice its passing, given the fact that most computers haven’t included a floppy drive for close to a decade now. But the floppy will always remain an icon both in the computer industry and on the desktop. The familiar floppy icon is still the graphic picture used to signal the command “Save” in most programs.
I personally haven’t bought a floppy disk in years, but my cupboard still has a few boxes of the disks (probably with old Windows backup files, Macintosh games and computer fonts).
Sony reportedly began making 3.5- inch floppy disks back in 1981 – at the time it was a much more compact and stable replacement for the 5.25-inch floppies that were then the primary storage medium. Of course, the 3.5-inch disk was no longer a true floppy like the larger flexible floppies before it, because they were encased in a protective shell. The 3.5-inch floppy remained the storage device of choice for more than a decade. According to the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Daily, Sony saw its Japanese sales reach a record 47 million in 2002. By 2009 it still sold 12 million, but the writing was on the wall.
CDs, DVDs, Zip and USB drives had displaced the floppy thanks to their much larger storage formats. Apple became the first computer manufacturer to eliminate the floppy drive with the release of the iMac in 1998. It still took the major PC manufactures a few years to follow suit, but by 2003 Dell also dropped the floppy drive from its popular Dimension computer line.
As for me, I’m not ready to throw my floppy disks into the trash just yet. After all, I still have a mint condition Macintosh computer and it won’t play Missile Command or Lode Runner unless I feed it the necessary disk. Besides, if my kids ever ask me why they use that funny looking picture of a square – or deck of cards – or whatever it is – as the icon for ‘Save’, I’ll be able to pull out a dusty disk from the closet and take them on a trip down floppy memory lane.
They might even get a kick out of flicking the spring-loaded metal window back and forth a few times.
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