Sony Killing Off Floppy Disk Production in 2011

People still use these things? I have been using them for skeet. They produce a much more random flight path then a clay pigeon.

Rest in peace, my floppy friends

I guess I should stock up for my retro rigs.

12 million floppies? And I thought floppies were dead.....

I think alot of them still get used for windows xp setups.

Great leap over 5.25" disks, I will miss you friendly floppy. You were indispensable for our ETC lightboard.

I still use them to flash BIOS's on old machines,or as an emegency boot disk when a BIOS gets fried.

I remember the first floppy I ever used was for gaming - Dave 2.
Still remember the drill : Insert diskette --> Open Command Prompt --> cd davedave
These little bastards sure deserve a 12 gun salute & a minute of silence.
Rest in Peace my dear friends.

What about Verbatim and Memorex floppies which you can still find around brick and mortar stores in the US? Are those also made by Sony but just re-branded?

I had to flash a RAID card BIOS using a floppy drive a couple months back. It took me 2 weeks to locate a working disk and a working drive to put the files on it!

does ppl have floppy drives in computers now? My mainboard don't even have a floppy drive connector

if u have windows 7 u could have used a USB Flash drive

It's about time. I hope board manufactures remove it in their BIOS too.

In high school I bought a hole puncher for single sided 3.5" disks which turned them into two sided disks and you only needed to buy the cheaper ones.

Also, there was some kind of formatting that I remember doing that make them several kilobytes larger...I think the standard was like 1.44 megs or something, and if you formatted them this special way, you'd get like 1.45 or 1.5 or something...can't remember.

And if you defraged them you could squeeze a few more files on them. But you were still always running out of space, so you had to jot done the blank space available on them and the smallest file size, and if you could find a file that would fit in the blank space of another disk, you just freed up several more kilobytes!

So you had to have boxes of these things to be able to store anything...but they were soooo much better than 5.25" disks.

Thank god computers have advanced beyond this. I now have an old 4 gig USB drive that is probably larger then the combined size of all the 3.5" disks I ever owned.

Floppies??

gosh, I switched over to zip disks ages ago, lol. Actually though, I do remember a time when nearly every computer had a zip drive in it. Boy did they blow it. Zip disks coulda killed off rewritable CDs if they had their act together. And I think I remember a couple different versions of high capacity floppy disks that should've had potential, too, if someone had been marketing them correctly.

I still use flopies on occasion mostly if I have to install XP with SATA or RAID drivers.

12 million * 1.44 mb = 17,280 GB.... Not all that much considering it involves keeping a part or entire factory operational... and obviously a much higher cost per MB than hard drives

Its about time. I haven't used floppies in ages. The last computer I had with a floppy drive was back in 2000.

I meant to comment on this. Problem with Zip disks is you needed a Zip drive, CD-ROM drives were much more popular to be found espically since then had been used in the recording industry. Zip disks also had reliabilty issues compared to CD's

Wow they are still making floppy disks? damn i havent even seen one in years let alone have a floppy drive in my PC.

Haha. I am currently working (at work) on a machine that has Windows XP with a DVD reader/Cd Burner a 3.5" drive AND a 5.25" drive. We use the 5.25 and 3.5 way more than we do CDs. Sucks for my boss. Ouch actually sucks for me. He is 68 and will more likely close than update.

Oh well... no more floppy dic(s)k jokes.

Same here. I have more machines than I care to buy Win 7 for (and I just completely skipped Vista). I keep XP on my older machines because the licenses are still good. Heck, I had to insert a floppy just this past weekend to create a backup of the harddrive.

I don't use floppies to move files around anymore, USB thumbdrives are far superioir, but I'll always keep some floppies around, even if they just collect dust. You never know when you might need one in the future. Heck, I might even still have some 5.25"s lying around somewhere.

compact disks are not what killed floppy and zip disks, not even close, it was usb flash drives.

Yeah, I've used them to install RAID drivers for XP. More commonly though I use them in older lab equipment and programmable environmental chambers.

many older oscilloscopes print files to 3.5" floppies....hence the 3.5" drive in my computer

I'm in a weird position because our machine shop has 5 Okuma CNC turning centers that use a proprietary floppy disk format to store files. One the machines is less than 3 years old. There is absolutely NO way around using 3.5" floppies to store files. The files can't be sent over the network because they don;t mesh with anything Windows. I even tried replacing a floppy drive with a compact flash floppy emulator with no success. I guess I'm gonna have to stock up on disks!

Don't copy that floppy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI

No word of a lie, I fixed the computer of a friend's sister and she had a panic attack when I told her that the floppy died (it didn't but we had to lie to her to get her to give it up) and she simply would not get the idea of a USB drive until I actually trainer her in its use. Ya, it's time to get rid of this obsolete, archaic technology.

I stopped using those 10 years ago. And I don't miss the days when a disk would go bad after minimal use. In my experience, ZIP disks are even worse.

Really the major thing that demolished floppies is the prevalence of cheap usb thumb drives. Why would he be opposed to those, they're essentially the same exact thing but with infinitely more space lol. CDs destroyed floppies in general but floppies still held some advantages over it, but thumb drives just blow them both away.