Finally, Death of the 3.5 inch floppy disk

Sony to discontinue 3.5 inch floppy disk April 24, 11:34 PMJapan Headlines ExaminerJoshua Williams

Sony announced on April 23rd that they will be discontinuing sales of the classic 3.5 inch floppy disk in Japan in 2011. The news marks a major end to a nearly three decade history of the disk type that the company helped to pioneer.

According to Sony, they introduced the 3.5 inch floppy disk size to the world in 1981, and began sales within Japan in 1983. Sony had shipped approximately 47 million disks within the country at its peak around the year 2000, but that number had fallen to around 8.5 million by 2009, Sankei News reported.

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Cheers Don...

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Don McKenzie

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Don McKenzie
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Hardly "death of the 3.5 inch floppy disk" to announce that one vendor will stop making them. Even 5.25" DSDD media and some 8" formats are still in production, as well as 3" flippies.

Reply to
larwe

Hi Lewin,

Considering Sony produced the first 3.5" floppies, and currently hold

70% of the world market, and many other manufacturers have pulled the plug, I would say death is very close to describing what the usage will be in 2011.

Some people still go to drive-in cinemas, use Betamax video format, rotary dial phones, and Edison wax cylinders, so these aren't dead either.

Only thing that is really dead, are people that fall off the perch. :-)

Cheers Don...

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Reply to
Don McKenzie

They still charge us a 'service fee' on the phone bill if we opt for touch tone service.

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Reply to
Jon

Just a thought. How many kids 15 or under would know what a rotary dial is, or ever used one?

Then, how many kids 15 or under, have ever written, or read a file to/from a 3.5" floppy?.

Not a lot I would think. I can't remember when I last used a floppy, must be many years. Would have been to prop up a short leg on a table. :-)

Footnote ** I laugh when the little ones of today, have to look at the back of your camera, after you take a picture. What did we do before they put the screen there?

Cheers Don...

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Don McKenzie

Most people waited 3 months to get their film processed before they found out he photo was no good! Digital camera's have at least seen a rise in people thinking about what they have shot. Unfortunately camera phones have seen a fall in the quality of many of those "photo's".

MrT.

Reply to
Mr.T

WOW, still 8.5 million sales in 2009 from one company alone! So far from dead then.

MrT.

Reply to
Mr.T

Someone forgot to tell microsoft.

The only way to load device drivers (drive interfaces, SCSI drivers etc) when installing windows is via the drive at A:. And that's your only option.

Short of creating a magical alternate boot install CD/DVD for every new model of box we get. Not looking forward to it.

Reply to
John Tserkezis

I'm sure I don't need to start hoarding them the way I hoard DSDD

5.25" and SSSD soft-sectored 8" media though :)

.

You've been peeking in my windows again! Except that I don't have a landline. But anyway - I think the only item you have on that list that isn't in active production is the drive-in theater, so you're right, they're not dead.

Quiz: Which music format showed the greater percentage sales growth in

2009; was it (a) Compact Disk - Digital Audio, or (b) stereo vinyl 33 1/3rpm LP?
Reply to
larwe

(c) Digital music downloads. (d) Music DVD's

Vinyl rose from a *VERY* small base, and CD's fell due to digital downloads and DVD's.

Once again proving that unqualified statistics prove nothing at all!

MrT.

Reply to
Mr.T

w

Actually, rumour has it, this is not the case in the two latest revisions of their OS. I say rumour as I have not ever tried installing one of these latest creations -- the one Windows Vista machine I used had it preloaded, and I've never touched Windows 7.

But yes, you make a valid point ... and I shall make a note to stock up on 3.5" floppy disks while they're easily available, as some of the ones I have at home are slowly decaying with age.

Reply to
Stuart Longland

ds

I explicitly did not include digital downloads for obvious reasons. I consider all physical media formats equally obsolete, so obviously it doesn't make sense to measure buggy whip sales against gasoline sales.

BTW, I refuse to believe the music DVD one - I've never even SEEN a music DVD. It's like SACD; it's an acronym, there were/are devices that can play them, but they're a mythical unicorn format.

Reply to
larwe

Yeah, unless it was steam, that one of Lara was quite blurry.

Reply to
Royston Vasey

Yes you appeared to be making an invalid point.

How silly, even digital downloads must end up on some "physical media format", even if it's a hard drive. And IF you consider vinyl to be analogous to buggy whips, why the silly quiz in the first place?

Now that's *really* silly. I have about a hundred, and there are *many* thousands currently available.

MrT.

Reply to
Mr.T

Server 2003 needs the floppy drive to load SCSI and SAS drivers, there is no option to read from a USB device.

I'll soon be installing Server 2008 and we'll see if the floppy is still needed.

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Reply to
Jon

No idea about Vista, but have installed Win7 several times so far, and yes, your only option is F6 to look at drive A:.

Indeed. I've never had much luck with the longevity of 3.5" disks. They simply do not last. And, owning to the fact we don't use them too often, (we get boxs with newfanged interfaces when we're least expecting it) we grab the first disk that's been kicking around in cabinet here. After we go through several bad ones, we throw them out to find there are none left.

As I said, we can create a custom boot disk, this is very doable, but we could have that box up and running in several minutes verses lots more.

Contrary to popular belief we DO have more important things to do than screw around with installs that don't like to play with the other children.

Reply to
John Tserkezis

Stocking a lot is unlikely to help. Not so long ago I did a final transfer of data I had on floppies from the early 90-s. They were all readable and in good health (some were even from the late 80-s), I moved them to images on newer media (HDD, which I currently backup on DVDs) all right.

But when I tried to write to some of them they all failed miserably, even the newest ones. Non-formattable, complete scrap. And some of them had been written just once or twice, so my guess is that even unused new disks will age and become unusable within max. 10 years. As if the brownish magnetic stuff they are covered with dries and hardens over the years and the tiny magnets inside remain stuck forever :-).

Dimiter

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Reply to
Didi

No, you just seem to be unwilling to think about what I was saying.

uiz

That's even more ridiculous. You do not buy digital downloads as a sector on your hard drive that is received and glued onto the platter, you buy the information download. You can delete your personal copy and redownload it later. In some cases you never actually download it in the sense of "for storage locally", you just stream it from an online library on demand.

By your argument, we should be considering the purchase of CD wallets as part of the CD sales process. And perhaps the purchase of whatever media were used to master the album originally.

LOL. I could say the same thing about my collection of 78rpm records. SACD and audio DVD are primarily an attempt by the music industry to get rid of CDs because CDs have no DRM.

Reply to
larwe

My latest machine lacks floppy support on the motherboard (Asus P6T WS). They suggest using a USB flash drive or USB floppy for RAID drivers.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

Now that you mention it, my experience mimics that too. Long term storage appears to be very much pot luck, but much longer than what I would have though reasonable for floppy media.

Writes on the other hand, pretty much all long term age disks proved failure prone in this regard.

Reply to
John Tserkezis

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