Farewell to the floppy disk

[AlexJ]

PC World today announced it would no longer be selling 3 1/2 inch floppy disks due to a lack of demand. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6314251.stm)

Does this mark the end of quite possibly the longest running removable storage device in the history of computers (26 years). Will it really be RIP 1981-2007? Do you even care?

Personally, I haven't used a floppy disk for several years now, with flash drives being as easy to use and CD-R's being cheaper and both having much more space. Still remembering back to the Amiga days how much fun I'd have from playing games on the format would make me a little sad to see it finally come to an end.

[Harrison]

I was just trying to remember when I last used a floppy disk on a PC and cannot remember. Now that blank CD and DVD are so cheap there isn't really any place for floppy disks. Except for retro system enthusiasts. I can see them struggling to find blank disks.

I have a feeling Steve might be quite upset and morn the passing of his beloved media of choice!

[Puni/Void]

Hehe.. that's true. I won't miss floppies a lot though. They were famous for read/write errors and the likes. As well as being incredibly slow, it's not a big loss. Time moves on, and so shall we.

[LowercaseE]

I haven't used floppy disks at home for quite a while, I don't even have a drive in my main PC there. At work, I do still have to use them, though not on any sort of regular basis. I have to download patches and what not for AIX and using a floppy is a lot quicker than CDROM for what I need to do.

[Harrison]

I'm still trying to remember when I last used a floppy disk on a PC. I must have been last year when I rebuilt a PC that has an SATA controller on the moterboard that needed its drivers loaded from floppy disk during the Windows XP setup and installation. Other than that I can't think when else I used one.

I'm so glad more recent motherboards have scrapped the need to load SATA controller drivers from floppy during setup. The more recent ones don't even need drivers at all and the SATA drives just appear in the BIOS like every other ATA HD and just work. Much better. I love ASUS!

[Stephen Coates]

I really couldn't care less whether PC World sell them or not as I don't buy them from there. I think I have only ever bought one item from PC World in my whole life.

[Demon Cleaner]

I only use a floppy drive plugged to my Catweasel, but nothing else. USB sticks are the best alternative to FD imo. You can also store 5kB files without wasting a CD. And it's so fast and errorfree.

[Harrison]

Very true. For small files you cannot beat a USB memory stick these days. And they are so cheap now. You can pick a 2GB one up for under £10.

And don't forget Steve that PC World is the largest high street store in the UK still selling floppy disks until now. They are part of Curries so when PC World stop selling them so does Curries and Argos. This will mean the bulk of high street retailers will have stopped selling them.

This in my view is a good thing as we need to leave behind the old technologies and move forward, instead of holding on to old technologies which just slow down the development of hardware. Look at how long PCI held back graphics card development before AGP and now PCI-E was developed.

[Submeg]

Hmm, its going to piss off my lecturers, they are quite bizzare, they like things only to be on floppy if you have to hand in an assignment. Will have to see if I can stockpile a few.

[Harrison]

Well lecturers are a strange breed unto themselves. Most probably haven't seen the light of day for many years and probably still view the floppy disk as modern and quite revolutionary compared to the tapes they used in their youth.