Monday, April 26, 2010

I Will Miss The Cute Little Beeps And Grunts

Sony announces the death of the floppy disk

"THE REIGN of the floppy disk is formally over, with Sony saying that it will discontinue domestic sales of its 3.5-inch floppy disks at the end of the year.
It should be no real surprise, since the technology has been a dead man walking for years and it has been increasingly hard to find a PC with a floppy drive installed.
Sony has been propping up the floppy disk data storage format and owns a 70 per cent share of the terminally ill market. The floppy has been killed off by the spread of more compact and larger capacity storage devices such as USB flash drives. Other manufacturers have already pulled out of the market.
Sony was the first into the global floppy disk market, launching the world's first 3.5-inch floppy disks in 1981. The devices spread widely as a storage medium for personal computers and word processors.
Manufacturers made a bomb out of the technology, reaching a peak of 47 million units in fiscal 2002. The rise of the CD drive, closely followed by DVD and USB flash drives, knocked out the floppy disk completely.
There were only 12 million floppy disk drive units sold last year and most them were in India and other developing economies."

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