Floppy RIP

udaman

udaman

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Joined
Sep 20, 2006
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Well it's a decade old news for us Mac users, but I'm guessing the windows crowd here is just <3 broken to see that famous legacy standard go, when ur so attached to it & an inferior OS :D, can't get wit da times.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/04/26/sony-to-stop-manufacturing-floppy-discs-after-30-years/

But soon it’s time to say goodbye, as the company now said [JP] it will stop production in March next year. Sony rolled out the world’s first 3.5-inch floppy disc back in 1981. And believe it or not, even in 2008, the company could still sell 8.5 million units in Japan alone.
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Wow, who would have thought Japan was the last bastion of the Cult of Balmer, Windows users?

floppy_sony.png





http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/28/the-floppy-disk-is-dead-and-apple-helped-kill-it/

It was 1998 and Apple had just released the iMac G3. It was a beautiful interesting computer: a sleek, all-in-one case, with something new called USB. One thing it didn't have was a floppy disk. At the time, many believed Apple was insane for leaving a floppy disk drive off the iMac, but did Steve Jobs care? Nope. The floppy was archaic technology to him. A CD-ROM drive was where it's at.
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People aren't using floppy disks any more? I'm shocked! I thought they were done at least five years ago for new systems.
 
Last time I used a floppy was 2 days ago, as part of imaging a PC using Ghost... Before that was 9 mths ago to do a BIOS update on a server...

Short story, the CD drive in the PC was problematic, the PC didn't want to boot off the USB key I had with Ghost on it, and the last option was to use the crusty dust laden floppy drive, which worked. For the server, the only updates available used the amiflash.exe application, which had to be run from DOS, and the server didn't support booting from USB.

The floppy has been dead for the mass consumer market for a long time, but quite a few industries still use them for data transfer... CNC machines, older model transport aircraft, PLC boxes, just to name a few... So is the 3.5" floppy really dead?
 
What is being discontinued, the drives or the media?
Either way, if there is a need, someone will make it somewhere.
 
Are adapters manufactured now? I gave up on that idea about 5 years ago after not being able to find them.
 
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