Still floppy?
Tallulah Habib

End of the 3.5-inch floppy announced.
It's the end of an era. Sony has announced that it will stop selling 3.5-inch floppy disks in March 2011.

About time? Probably. Apple stopped using the magnetic storage media back in 1998, Dell in 2003. Sony, however, has clung fast to what is essentially its baby, having produced the first 3.5-inch in 1981.

Floppy disks - so called because of the flexible magnetic disk on which data was captured – were ubiquitous in the 1980s and early ‘90s as a cheap and easy method of data transfer and storage. The IBM eight-inch 23FD was the first, with an amazing 79.7KB of storage (approximately the size of one low-quality picture), but as file size grew and the demand for space became greater, it was superceded by versions with more capacity – the 3.5-inch boasting 1.4MB, which was impressive... until the CD came along (with 700MB).

Now, with the average flash drive giving you 2GB (2000MB) just as easily as our friend the floppy, it's no wonder that Sony has decided to call it quits. What is more of a wonder is that, according to cnet news, Sony sold 12 million floppies in fiscal 2009 in Japan alone. One has to wonder what people were using them for. My bet is on an art project.