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Sony prepares to stop manufacturing floppy disks
Since their peak of 47 million units sold in 2002, Sony’s floppy disk business has dwindled steadily. Japan is one of the few remaining markets where Sony still sells floppies, where it accounts for roughly 70% of all sales. The company is not jumping ship yet though, as it plans to continue selling the 3.5 inchers domestically until March 2011.
Sony has been involved with many digital storage devices over the years, but few have been as pervasive as the floppy diskette. IBM created the original floppy disk which measured a whopping 8 inches wide. Many iterations of the device followed as companies came up with smaller and faster designs. As one of these companies, Sony introduced their own 90mm diskette in 1982, but it never took off; 5.25 inch floppies were too firmly entrenched within the industry. Despite the apparent failure of Sony’s form factor, a group of companies used it as the basis for what would become the 3.5 inch floppy, eventually ending the “five and quarter’s” reign.
As consumers' needs became more complex, the need for capacity increased and floppies were simply unable to meet that demand. Despite this crucial inadequacy, many technologies which aimed to supplant the aging medium such as Zip disks, Super Disks and recordable CDs failed to replace it entirely.
Eventually, it took the ubiquitous adoption of USB flash drives to serve as the death knell for mainstream floppy usage. However, with over 12 million disks sold in 2009 by Sony alone, it would seem floppies may be around for some time come.
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User Comments (22)
Post a comment|
Kibaruk
on April 26, 2010 7:21 AM |
12 million sold? Wow! Who would still be using these? |
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slh28
on April 26, 2010 7:24 AM |
12 million disks sold?? I wonder who buys them any more, although I think some vendors still sell floppy readers with their systems. |
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LightHeart
on April 26, 2010 7:41 AM |
With Windows 2003, XP when you add a 3rd party driver, it wants it from a floppy drive. For older hardware there are times when you need a floppy, though we have not purchase any floppy disks in years, just using old ones we have laying around. |
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Julio Franco
on April 26, 2010 7:45 AM |
According to Wikipedia, it wasn't until last year that HP stopped shipping floppy drives with business oriented desktops, I'm assuming as an option rather than as standard equipment. |
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Guest
on April 26, 2010 7:46 AM |
There are a lot of legacy systems hidden in many large corporations that take floppies. Old version of Ghost (version 8 or so) of consumer and enterprise both use floppy disks for the bootable media. On older machines you can't boot to USB drives so you need floppys if the item is not on CD. But why is Japan using so many floppies? Japan's infrastructure is MUCH more modern than U.S. and they would not have so many legacy systems to justify the purchases. |
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PaulWuzHere
on April 26, 2010 7:57 AM |
Floppy discs and agp will never die lol. Since 2004 I haven't even included a floppy drive in any of my machines. Used to temporarily have one to load a raid driver in windows xp. Now vista and 7 allow CDs, DVDs, and Flash Drives for that. |
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ET3D
on April 26, 2010 8:25 AM |
I'm still hanging on to a a couple of diskette drives in case I'll one day have all the time in the world to convert my Amiga diskettes to images using Disk2DFI. Of course, that day is unlikely to come, and current motherboards don't even support two drives, which are required for the trick that enables reading these diskettes. Maybe it's time I got rid of them. |
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gobbybobby
on April 26, 2010 9:51 AM |
Bought an N Wifi Stick for my PC and the driver came on a Floppy disc. Stupid as I don't have a floppy drive. Alot of Drivers for Hardware still come on a floppy. |
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TomSEA
on April 26, 2010 10:34 AM |
I thought this had already happened years ago. I'll bet it's been 5-6 years since I last used a floppy. |
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TorturedChaos
on April 26, 2010 11:37 AM |
I think i the last 10 years or so I have only had to dig out a floppy twice. Both time it were to flash a BIOS on an older machine. And very rarely (maybe once every 2 months) does someone wander into the print shop I work in with data on a floppy disk. I remember in grade school tho every kid had to have a 3.5" floppy to store any files on b/c the school didn't have a file server to do it. U just prayed your floppy didn't get corrupted when it had your 8th grade end of the year project on it :P. |
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Jibberish18
on April 26, 2010 11:51 AM |
Be damned! Up until now, I didn't even THINK about floppies, let alone consider the fact that 12 Million in 2009. And Japan of all places accounted for 70% of those sales. They're such a weird country. Just when you think you have them figured out. |
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matrix86
on April 26, 2010 12:06 PM |
Jibberish18 said: Be damned! Up until now, I didn't even THINK about floppies, let alone consider the fact that 12 Million in 2009. And Japan of all places accounted for 70% of those sales. They're such a weird country. Just when you think you have them figured out. Indeed, Jibberish. One of the most technically advanced countries and they are still using floppies. |
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tengeta
on April 26, 2010 1:02 PM |
2002 was the peak year? That seems too recent... Guess I should pick up a pack to keep on hand sometime soon before everyone quits making them. |
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DarkCobra
on April 26, 2010 1:14 PM |
All I can say is . . . goodbye to an old and trusted friend (the floppy). |
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Relic
on April 26, 2010 1:40 PM |
Way to go floppies! Had some awesome memories with ya...think I still have some old school games saved on them too somewhere =P. But after getting my first USB drive in 2001 I never turned back. I did try out Zip Disks for a while which I thought were pretty neat. TorturedChaos said: I remember in grade school tho every kid had to have a 3.5" floppy to store any files on b/c the school didn't have a file server to do it. U just prayed your floppy didn't get corrupted when it had your 8th grade end of the year project on it :P. Ha, my school was the same...fun times when someone infected the whole lab with a virus and spread it to everyone, almost as fast as our cafeteria staff spreading the flu lol. |
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Guest
on April 26, 2010 2:23 PM |
End of floppies? Sad day! Remember when we used to trick them into holding more than the native 360k/720k/1.44M? Then after (or before) on read/write cycle, they would fail. Now hardware seldom fails, that task has been taken over by software. Happy days. From guest: "jayesstee". |
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LightHeart
on April 26, 2010 2:48 PM |
Used one today The funny thing is later today after reading this story, I needed a floppy. OK, I could have gotten around it however I had a system that needed a BIOS update (OS was toast and I needed BIOS update to get PXE boot to work) and I used DOS with BIOS image on a floppy, which upated it just fine. |
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Guest
on April 26, 2010 4:24 PM |
Last time I used a floppy was to get my RAID setup to work during a Windows XP installation in 2006. |
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NeoFlux
on April 27, 2010 4:32 AM |
All I can say is . . . goodbye to an old and trusted friend (the floppy). I agree with an "OLD" part and definitely do not agree with "TRUSTED" part... |
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thatguyandrew92
on April 27, 2010 5:31 AM |
I miss my zips! lol |
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DarkCobra
on April 27, 2010 12:13 PM |
NeoFlux said:
All I can say is . . . goodbye to an old and trusted friend (the floppy). I agree with an "OLD" part and definitely do not agree with "TRUSTED" part... Actually, when you go back as far as I do in the computer world . . . the Floppy was indeed "trusted" back in the day. If you understood their limitations and treated them properly they pretty much worked. No storage media is perfect and even the high capacity storage formats we have today can and do fail. It's just that back-in-the-day, THAT is what we had and we made it work for us. Again, were they perfect? Nope, but we did trust them and used them for many years. |
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maestromasada
on April 27, 2010 11:27 PM |
I remember when I was a kid, we buried in the garden of our old house a tin with some pictures of my family, a letter for the future and a floppy with my art work in Windows 3.1 Paint... snif! Will someone be able to read the floppy if my box is unearthed in the future? Probably not |
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