“The slow death of the ‘floppy’ or ‘diskette’ began in 1998 when Apple decided to not include a floppy drive in its G3 iMac computer,” The Beeb reports “Since then various other firms have stopped support for floppy disks, including computer giant Dell in 2003. Computing store PC World stopped selling them in 2007.”
MacDailyNews Take: Apple leads. The also-rans follow years later. As usual.
The Beeb reports, “Sony has decided to halt sales completely faced with competition from online storage and portable USB drives.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What’s a floppy disk? 
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Jon B.” for the heads up.]
I haven’t used a floppy in 10 years!
WTH is a floppy disk?!!!!
The end of an era – counting the floppy disks which came before the 3.5″ ones, that’s a long time they managed to stick around.
call microsoft and dell
But, how will companies sell their Windows software to the public?!?!?
I still think Apple dumping the floppy in ’98, when the iMac still didn’t have a CD-burner, USB drives were very expensive, and few people had broadband, was premature. It did create an inconvenience for a number of people. By 2001-2, it made much more sense. And don’t get me started on Zip or Jaz disks…those things failed constantly!!
Old School. Hmm seems to me I recall using 8 inch floppies for our Optics/Video computers back in 1984. That and DecPak Removable Platter hard drives for our PDP/1145’s.
Am I showing my age?
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”hmmm” style=”border:0;” />
They should start selling Mac OS X on flash drives.
In 84 I was using the state of the art storage on my Mac512
the 3.5″ floppy
Floppy what?
Floppy disk? How quaint.
I’m trying to remember the last time I needed to save a 1.4MB file.
Now I’m starting to feel old.
But are they still supporting the tape cassette drives for the TRS-80?
The old floppy disk… now known as the flacid disk!
It’s amazing how the scale of files has changed, my first Mac had an 800k floppy (Mac Plus) and an add-on 30mb HD.
Now I’m a professional sports photographer (sorta) and routinely shoot 12-15 GBs worth of pics in a day.
I remember a few years ago when my wife wanted to back up her work PC. I had been bugging her to get a CD burner – this was before DVD burners – but her boss wouldn’t spend the dough. So, she was gonna go out to Office Depot and buy some floppies. She asked me how many she would need, and I told her:
…about 30,000.
Make that “flaccid” disk!
When 5.25 floppies (REAL floppies) were the norm, the introduction of the 3.5 hard-shell floppy, with that EXTREMELY COOL spring-loaded shutter door was a big event. Apple was the first use them and the first to lose them.
You couldn’t run a Mac without doing the floppy switch when I started using Macs in my consulting business.
I guess I will have to stock up.
tekriter,
For that work and that much volume, JPEG or RAW?
No floppies?
Won’t that leave some hard up….?
@tekriter
funny
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />
I can’t remember the last time I used a CD to install something on my Mac
those were 5.25″ floppies, not the 3.5″ ones folks are more familiar with these days (decreasingly so)…
I still have boxes and boxes of floppies (both sizes)… since all my old Macs still work, I will keep the floppies around.