Before the USB flash drive was the CD. And before the CD was the floppy disk. Now the floppy disk will soon be history.
Sony announced today that it will cease production of the 3.5-inch floppy disk in March 2011. The company currently produces 70 percent of all floppy disks in the world. At one point in time, 47 million of them per year world sold in Japan alone.Each floppy (also called a diskette) can hold 1.4MB of data, which was sufficient back in the 1980's. Now however, that amount of storage is simply too small for any practical use today. An average iTunes song is about 3MB. A picture taken with a digital camera is about 2MB. Clearly, the data we're storing nowadays far surpasses what the floppy was made to hold.
Dell made a similar move in 2003 when it stopped installing 3.5-inch floppy drives into it's computers. With the surge in usage of USB thumb drives, this writer wonders when the computer maker will stop putting in CD-ROM drives.
Over the years, people have found creative uses for the diskette, such as recycling it for modern art and also making a box to hold markers.
So although the once popular floppy disk will be a thing of the past, it will still live among us - in the form of the save icon.
Source: The Washington Post, Times of India
D.Wu
Over the years, people have found creative uses for the diskette, such as recycling it for modern art and also making a box to hold markers.
So although the once popular floppy disk will be a thing of the past, it will still live among us - in the form of the save icon.
D.Wu
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