Sony delivers floppy disk last rites

The days of the 3.5-inch floppy disk are now officially numbered.

Sony, which boasts 70 percent of the anemic market, announced Friday that it would end Japanese sales of the ancient storage medium in March 2011, according to a report in the Mainichi Daily newspaper.

[josh14399]

im sure floppy disks are still commonly used in businesses

[Joule]

People still us floppy's?

[Red_Orange_Juice]

I remember throwing away floppy drive many, many years ago, when most people stil had it, and they were like, where's your 3.5 drive man? :).

[thereapersson]

Floppies can still come in handy. Namely, if you are working with anything BIOS-related, sometimes the only way to back anything up is via the A: drive, or the floppy drive.

[bjornbear]

consider Africa and other parts of the world where they have 1 "net cafe" in town for hundreds if not thousands of people to use...i'm sure in some cases they still use floppies, and others...thats my guess =P

[Hill_billy]

But never use it. I'm married... With Children...

*cries*

[juniordee]

And we learn how to use floppys. Businesses still use them for BIOS related stuff. Some businesses still use Windows 98, so it's still important to know how to create a 98 boot disk with a floppy.

[somesonyguy]

I laughed so hard @ that I almost got busted @ work for screwin' around on the internet. Don't feel bad, I've a wife and 4 kids....

[HolyOrangeCows]

I remember VHS putting up a heck of a fight...the last shipment was on December 31, 2008.

[AuToFiRE]

nope, its all networked now, no need even for CDs

Anyway, you will be remembered but not missed, especially trying to install some games off of you, 10 floppy disks? come on, it is now time to move on

[thereapersson]

Installing the DooM shareware into my friend's DOS machine from floppy disks. I think there were like nine of them... sh1t took forever to finish!

[vhero]

Most businesses moved onto USB drives from floppy. They have officially stopped making floppy drives now so its obvious the demand for disks would die down eventually. Although you think 12 million is a lot some countrys are slow to move onto new technology like USB.

[ProjectVulcan]

Flash wins, especially USB because most machines have USB beyond ten years back now. This is also not to mention these days encrypted USB flash drives are fairly secure which can be a factor for business use.

[tahersaid]

If you are guessing that we ( Africans ) have one net cafe for thousands of people and make laugh at it, then you don' know anything about this world.

[bjornbear]

didn't know I was that wrong, it was a guess anyway

i used africa as an example, since its a huge continent and I said SOME locations, not everyone damn it! I know that!

I meant to say there are parts of the world that use floppy's because the access to what we take for granted as "old tech" isn't so readily available

i didn't mean to insult anyone

[Pika-pie]

I thought they did away with these years ago. Whos still buying them..

They are slow, clunky, noisy, easily breakable and only hold 2megs of data.

[TotalPS3Fanboy]

Floppy Disk is sufficient enough already. LOL.

[Pedobear Rocks]

from 5 1/4 to 3.5 inch disks...it was a freaking miracle.

PBR

[Ghoul]

or from datasets (audio cassets) to 5 1/4 :P

[Pedobear Rocks]

my Vic 20 and Sinclair ZX80 both had tape drives...then their was my school computer...a Digital PDP11 that read punch cards.

Good times.

[cyborg6971]

Isn't it rites not rights?

[Theoneneo81]

seriously 4 comments and no approvals comon :)

[trgz]

Sony who?

[Lionsguard]

Ya know, Sony? The people that created half of the electronics you own and you have used since you popped out of your mom, yea them!

[Neo604]

the one that create free to play online.

[trgz]

Ah, sarcasm - well-spotted the 3 of you. Minus points awarded to the fanboys.
@kydrice - I've only ever bought one item from them and that was a Walkman cassette player (though I'm looking at buying a PS3 at the mo). I tend to choose by a products abilities & performance rather than ignorantly picking a name or believing the hype - sound familiar?

[champ21]

RIP Floppy Disk.

The days of installing Dos via Floppy, or installing Windows 3.1 seems like an ancient memory.

[Close_Second]

...terrabytes of this type of disc were sold over the years. I remember the Amiga use to format these discs to 880k, well before the PC formatted them to 1.4MB.

I must admit at one stage I would have had over 250 discs in my possession but I never thought of it as having over 250MB which back then (1990) was a huge amount of storage.

[champ21]

I had a ton of these up until recently, even though i didnt use them.

I was shifting home, so found a whole lot of them in one of the older boxes. Got rid of all of them since i dont have a PC with a Floppy drive anymore.

I see more and more people have USB flashdisks for storage needs.

Its amazing though how far we have come in terms of storage.

1.44mb on a floppy drive vs upto 64gigs on a USB flash disk. Though i am sure 15years from now 64gigs will be a joke.

[Cajun Chicken]

Ah well, with all your USBs, probably a good idea to abandon them, there's much better ways of storage these days.

[Xof]

I haven't even seen a floppy in at least a decade.

[Sir_Ken_Kutaragi__]

"Sony delivers xBox 360's last rites" ;-P ;-P ;-P

[caffman]

had to make a new login to go trolling have we?

[karan8624]

That was clever

Good Show Mr. Ken

[Foxgod]

I use floppy's for my MSX2, it doesnt eat cd's, only floppy's,cartrdiges and tapes.

[Theonik]

I hope these are copies of Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2. :P

[xAlmostPro]

and nthere i was hoping for a floppy drive attachment for ps3 -_- LOL is this really a big issue?

[juniordee]

Yes, it is to some people. Can't you think outside "gaming"? Read my other comment above.

[Hideo_Kojima]

But I can just use my old external USB/Flopy Disk Drive to access my floppy discs on my PS3...

[YoungKingDoran]

uh... well what the hell else am i going to use for my storage needs now

[nikoado]

What surprised me is that they sold 12 million floppy disks in 2009!

I thought we were waaay past using those things by now, unless everyone is using them for BIOS.

[GodsHand]

Good riddance. These floppy drives were a pain in my butt, always getting corrupted disk. But I will keep a floppy drive just incase for the future where something is needing a floppy drive. I wonder what ever happened to that super floppy disk that held like 120MB of information, and no I am not talking about the ZIP Drive which was larger, and only held 100MB. These disc were the same size as a standard floppy.

[somedude5892]

I did not know anyone still made these.

[CarnageXB]

We still have a box of floppy drives disks [most aol things that have been over written] and we dont even have a floppy drive anymore

[-SIXAXIS-]

I remember the old 3.5" floppies. Good times...

[Surt]

Later I learned to appreciate you. Floppy disk, you never hurt no one. (on purpose) You will be missed. (sorta of)

[TheObserver]

Some programs I use still have the floppy symbol for "Save File". I bet the youngsters are like "What the hell is that supposed to mean? Why did they draw the save button as a weird box?"

The floppy is iconic, I will be sad if the save button don't have the floppy picture anymore.

[hazelamy]

didn't think anybody still even made these.

[psycho360]

Sony can't deliver last rites to xbox360 as it is not their product however they can lay it out ps3