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.

[24hourpartypal Posted Apr 26th 2010 4:35PM]

@DeAthWaGer
that might very well be the best website ever

[bigcow05 Posted Apr 26th 2010 4:49PM]

Floppies are still pretty common in Japan. My girlfriend's mom still uses them at school and on her 3-year-old Fujitsu laptop.

[thedude Posted Apr 26th 2010 5:09PM]

Good! Those unreliable f*ckers cost me many assignments!

[thrash1256 Posted Apr 26th 2010 5:24PM]

Uh, Maxell still sells them..

[Pearl Jam Posted Apr 26th 2010 6:58PM]

This is similar to when I found out about Ricky Martin 'coming out'...

"Wait, he's only coming out now?"

[beezle Posted Apr 26th 2010 8:11PM]

and what about loading drivers when installing XP or other older os?

[pddro Posted Apr 26th 2010 8:11PM]

What's that?

[Metayoshi Posted Apr 26th 2010 9:46PM]

We still use floppies at my work to save logs, just in case our system reboots unexpectedly. Not only that, some PC motherboard manufacturers still go the route of using a floppy for updating their BIOS. The latter situation is kind of annoying, but thank god for being able to create a bootable USB flash drive (though it was pretty annoying to get it to that state at first).

[Densta0607 Posted Apr 26th 2010 11:08PM]

Not the floppy disk! It's too unreliable and short of space to get rid of! Now what will I store all of my files with? What's that? You say we have flash drives now?! And they have much more space on them? More portable too? Yay problem solved. Haha. Just kidding. I will miss you floppies....

[jamesFF Posted Apr 27th 2010 12:52AM]

I remember when Internet companies would send us their programs on 3.5" floppies. We would clean them and used them for our own use.

[Damo Posted May 19th 2010 9:38AM]

I remember cutting out notches in the cheaper double density disks so you could reformat them in high density.
Dare say it didn't help the situation as far as reliability went!

Last time I used floppies was probably 5 years ago to update the version of OS/2 warp on an ATM at the bank I worked at. Think it was 20 floppies I had to spend an hour-and-a-half feeding it. LOL