Floppy Disks Get The Chop - R.I.P. January 30, 2007

Read more Gadgets , Gizmodo UK , PC , Peripherals , Portable Media , Storage

PC World is killing off the floppy disk by announcing that it won't stock any more of them once the existing stock has sold out.

Capable of storing 1.44MB of data, the floppy disk was the blank CD and DVD of the 1980s and early 1990s. Hell, I still have the original Warcraft game which came on the format. You might think that 1.44MB wasn’t a lot of storage - and it wasn’t - but then there were no such things as MP3s or video files, while the Internet and downloading content was in its infancy.

“The sound of a computer’s floppy disk drive will be as closely associated with 20th century computing as the sound of a computer dialling in to the Internet", said Bryan Magrath, commercial director of PC World. "The pace of technological change is relentless and it is now increasingly standard for computer users to transfer data via the Internet or use USB memory sticks, some of which will store the equivalent of 1,000 times the capacity of floppy disk. With that amount of memory available in such a small and convenient device, the floppy disk looks increasingly quaint and simply isn’t able to compete.”

Some quick facts:

2 billion floppy disks were sold globally in 1988, according to the Recording Media Industries Association of Japan.

Today, 98% of all PCs in PC World have no floppy, or ‘A’ drive. It will be 100% by this summer.

Jump now for a few historical milestones and trivia.-Martin Lynch

Floppy Milestones

* In 1971, IBM introduced the first floppy disk. The first floppy was an 8 inch plastic disk coated with magnetic iron oxide. The nickname "floppy" came from its flexibility. The floppy disk was revolutionary device in its time due to its portability and the ease with which data could be transferred from computer to computer. The original floppy disk, invented by Alan Shugart, held 100 KBs of data.

* In 1976, the 5 ¼ inch flexible disk drive and diskette was developed by Alan Shugart for Wang Laboratories. Wang had wanted a smaller floppy disk and drive to use with their desktop computers. By 1978, more than 10 manufacturers were producing 5 1/4" floppy drives.

* In 1981, Sony introduced the first 3 1/2" floppy drives and disks, the standard used to this day.

* In some countries, including South Africa, 3½-inch floppy disks are commonly called stiffies or stiffy disks, because of their "stiff" (rigid) cases. In Finnish, the term is korppu (rusk, crumpet, biscuit).

* New Order's dance track "Blue Monday" was initially sold in a sleeve designed to resemble a 5¼-inch floppy disk. Fatboy Slim's 1995 album, Better Living Through Chemistry, features a 3½-inch floppy with the track names on its label.

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