After decades of storing data for millions of computer users world-wide, the floppy disk is now officially dead. Sony has announced that they will no longer manufacture the disks, effectively bringing an end to one of the computer world’s most memorable eras.
The floppy has been on life support ever since Dell and other PC manufacturers stopped building the drives into their new computers back in 2003. With their vastly improved storage capacity and speed, optical discs made the floppy more or less obsolete in that year, and since then the market for blank floppies has been virtually nil.
There are still plenty of floppy disks around however. Most everyone who used computers back in the day has at least a box or two sitting in a closet somewhere, holding data that will most likely never be “read” again. But that’s OK. There are lots of memories locked away on those little pieces of plastic, and not all of them are stored as digital zeroes and ones.
I have a lot stored on these little buggers…