Sony shutting down Japanese floppy disk sales by March 2011, kills a tech dinosaur

Believe it or not, Sony managed to shift 12 million 3.5-inch floppy disks in Japan last year -- presumably to die-hard old schoolers. Alas, time waits for no one, and the venerable data transporter that started its life way back in 1981 is going to all but cease production by March of next year. Sony was the last of the major manufacturers to keep churning these bits of plastic out, but soon that too shall be no more. Having already shut down operations in most of the world, it's now noted the end of life for its domestic market, and thereby effectively consigned the floppy to the past. Good riddance, you might say, but we still remember fondly the wonder we experienced upon tearing apart our first 5.25-inch floppy disk. Ah well, the diskette goes the way of the cassette, guess that was predictable.

[Jordo1234 Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:04AM]

Awww...

[Salath911 Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:20AM]

@Jordo1234 *21 gun salute* We will miss you old friend.

[Sea Urchin Posted Apr 26th 2010 10:04AM]

@Jordo1234

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

[v6sonoma Posted Apr 26th 2010 10:05AM]

@Salath911 Hmm wouldn't it be a 21 disk read error salute? The home PC just hasn't been the same without the buzzing and whirring of the 3.5" drive. Oh how I miss the rage inducing days of install multi disk software only to get an error on the 6th disk and being forced to start again. How many boot disks did I make for various games tweeking DOS 6.22 with the hope of anything running. It was a pain, but I miss those days. Gone but not forgotten. ;-(

[darkmax Posted Apr 26th 2010 10:22AM]

@Jordo1234

Hmm... fancy Engadget getting this wrong. the 5.25" is call a floppy disk. The 3.5" is a microdisk.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 26th 2010 11:08AM]

@darkmax Maybe technically, but everyone still called the 3.5" disks "floppies" even if they were rigid plastic.

[Alexicov Posted Apr 26th 2010 11:23AM]

@darkmax
What, your 3.5'' was never floppy?

[who said what Posted Apr 26th 2010 12:11PM]

@Alexicov

So long floppy! It was fun while it lasted.
Nothing made me feel more like a geek when I was a kid than when I slid you into that drive! I almost felt like I was going to work for NASA someday!

[chispito Posted Apr 26th 2010 12:29PM]

@v6sonoma

My sentiments exactly. I was a master at freeing up the most of my 640kb. XMS? Screw that stuff.

But I do not miss floppy disks at all. As late as 2003, I still would carry papers back and forth to the school library computer lab to work on them this way, but this is how I lost my finalized copy of my senior thesis (a paper on anime, if you are curious). I finished it, printed it, and then never recovered the file from the disk.

Lame.

[collindow Posted Apr 26th 2010 12:33PM]

@Sea Urchin
I...*sob* Childhood; goodbye!

[FADE Posted Apr 26th 2010 2:13PM]

@Jordo1234
They are stopping production at a nice even 30 years at least.

[Colin S Posted Apr 26th 2010 5:16PM]

@darkmax
People from Phoenix are Phoenicians.

[kjsin1994 Posted Apr 26th 2010 7:15PM]

@Colin S so the phoenicians made the phoenix alphabet?

[Generic Posted Apr 28th 2010 9:28AM]

@Jordo1234

Some programs have not been using floppy disk icons on the save button for a while now. One that pops to mind is jEdit which is a programmer oriented text editor. I wonder if we will ever have such a ubiquitous symbol for "Save" in the future?

[ChairmanMeow Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:05AM]

RIP

[slimjim316 Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:58AM]

@ChairmanMeow

Good-bye Mr A:

[SRChiP Posted Apr 26th 2010 10:05AM]

@slimjim316 Now can we use our A: drive to mount linux? :P

[Sogeking Posted Apr 26th 2010 10:58AM]

@SRChiP

My A: has long been assigned to my USB stick.


What? It's a laptop, there never was any floppy drive.


:(

[dacari Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:05AM]

what is this floppy thing you speak of?

[pavlindrom Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:11AM]

@dacari disk

[Jeremiah Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:15AM]

@dacari Your girlfriend was talking about yours to me last night....

[Alexster404 Posted Apr 26th 2010 10:33AM]

@Jeremiah
Was it a nice conversation?

[dacari Posted Apr 26th 2010 11:12AM]

@Jeremiah did she tell you about the virus she put on it?

[scots79 Posted Apr 26th 2010 12:08PM]

@dacari Amazing comeback. +500 internets to you good sir.

[Zzephyr Posted Apr 26th 2010 1:23PM]

@dacari One obligatory Zing! for you,dude.

[Dr Blight Posted Apr 26th 2010 2:25PM]

@dacari

Don't copy that floppy!

[Atkins Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:08AM]

I was so surprised to see a box of flashy floppy disks in a shop in Akihabara when I first arrived...

[NikAmi Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:42AM]

@Atkins So, when a buddy asks a friend to bring that new movie he's got over to his house, he should expect the beep-beep of a dump truck full of diskettes reversing into his driveway?

[Atkins Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:51AM]

@NikAmi Lol. Something like that scenario :)

[Vance Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:10AM]

I'm still able to mentally divide a folder into 1.44 MB chunks.

[delski Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:10AM]

This news brought tears to my eyes....I have fond memories of these floppies, i used them to save the first pirated games i brought....ahhh time flies so fast.... so long floppies....

[aMac Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:11AM]

Don't copy that floppy.

[blenderman345 Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:13AM]

Wait, they still SELL those things??????!?!?!?

[LAY Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:31AM]

@blenderman345

For old PCs that cant boot from a USB drive, those things are lifesavers.

Although I shudder to think anyone still uses them for actual file storage.

[Jeff P Posted Apr 26th 2010 10:04AM]

@blenderman345
I thought the exact same thing. I threw away my last box of floppies several years ago.

[OddManOut Posted Apr 26th 2010 11:52AM]

@LAY Yep. Part of my job involves testing prototype motherboards and systems for a major PC maker. Sometimes for some odd reason new ones won't boot off of USB flash drives (an essential thing with many of the software tools we use). The solution is usually a BIOS update...which is yet another thing we usually use a bootable flash drive for.

Many is the time I have saved the day with the $10 USB floppy drive (weird huh ? even though it is USB as well the floppy drive works when the flash stick don't) I purchased in Akihabara 3 years ago.

They're pretty hand for making bootable CDs as well as a boot partition source...

[Alex Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:13AM]

Someone's still got to be making them.

I'd love to throw both a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy drive into the media bays of my next custom build.

[Fizz Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:15AM]

12 million last year? Wow.

[irmeli Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:22AM]

@Fizz
there are still thousands of cnc mills and routers used in daily production around the world that use floppies to read g-code from.

[Ed T Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:42AM]

@irmeli

We have one in our shop, in an old Centroid control. I replaced the 3.5 floppy drive with an SD card reader. It works great, but good old DOS insists on reading the entire directory each time it's accessed, so use the smallest card you can find...

[lwatcdr Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:47AM]

@irmeli
There are also thousands or tens of thousands of Steno Machines "What court reporters use" that use a floppy, and goodness knows how many sampling keyboards that use them.
How many perfectly good devices will end up in the trash heap because you will no longer be able to get floppies?

[irmeli Posted Apr 26th 2010 10:34AM]

@Ed T
chuckle..we just converted our manual mill to cnc with a centroid controller..although the new one that runs linux and reads usb sticks or gets the data by lan

[schultz Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:16AM]

Hah i remember installing early computer games using these things... it would take like 8 floppy disks to install the game and between the speed of these things and the computers of the time it would take hoursss

[NHAnimator Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:24AM]

@schultz

Yeah. I remember games where you would go through a door, have to Insert Disk 4, decide you didn't want to go that way and have to immediately Insert Disk 3. Ah, the good times.

And now we're filling up Blu-Ray discs. I feel really old now.

[Alimas Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:40AM]

@schultz

I had a an AT&T laptop for a long time with Windows 95 and no optical drive...13 floppy discs.

That sucked.

[Jetpaq Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:16AM]

So long old pal. Its been fun. Remember the time we managed to squeeze in a whole image of Pam Anderson from our school computer back to our Windows 95 machine at home? Ahh memories.

[LAY Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:33AM]

@Jetpaq

My first MP3 download fit on a floppy. I had dreams of a collection of songs on floppies that would reside on my shelf next to the LPs.
There were no stand-alone players back then.

[ChristianTexan Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:50AM]

@Jetpaq
I remember only 10 years ago I took a trip to Paris with my brand-new Sony Mavica camera, which used the 3.5"'s. The camera was huge.

But long before that, I remember how much more stable the 3.5's were compared to the 5.25's. My Commodore 5141c disc drive would stop reading them correctly. Then someone would bend the jacket, & I'd take it out & try to put it in another one... ah, the memories...

[onlymyrailgun Posted Apr 26th 2010 10:31AM]

@LAY
Back in those days, downloading was bitch too. Between filling your shelves with floppies and having that many songs downloaded, I don't know which one is more ambitious.

[sethmo Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:17AM]

I should buy a couple boxes of new floppy discs and throw them in my safe for 50 years. Maybe they would be worth something then :)