Tuesday, January 30, 2007

The end of an era

Floppy disks are finally going the way of the dodo.
After 36 years and billions of sales, the floppy disk is to join the video player, cassette deck and film camera on technology's scrapheap.

The 9cm piece of plastic will no longer be available from Britain's biggest computer retailer.

PC World announced last night it would stop selling the disks when stocks ran out.
The thing that finally killed them, I'd wager, is portable cheap flash drives. A CD-ROM is a ridiculous container for a Word document, but a flashdrive works just fine.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I loves my Flash drive. I just got a new 4GB one too - anyone need a 256MB flash drive?.

On the other hand, I can't make dork jokes about backing up new hard drives on 548,571 floppies anymore.

Anonymous said...

Actually Steve Jobs and the original iMacs kicked it off being the only person with the guts to say no more floppy drives in our computers.

Without that I'd wager odds that floppy drives would be substantially more common now even with flash drives.

That said, flash drives certainly put the last nail in the coffin.