Farewell to Sony’s 3.5-inch Floppy Disks

**no1_vern** · April 26th, 2010, 05:01 PM

Well, the truth is I haven't used a 3.5-inch Floppy Disk in ages, nor did I have any idea they were still being made(much like the author of the piece.

Farewell to Sony’s 3.5-inch Floppy Disks
After 29 years of global market life since their worldwide debut in 1981, Sony’s 3.5 floppy discs will take their place among the once-upon-a-time pieces of technology items as the company announced on April 23 of their decision to cease their sales in Japan at the end of March 2011. Hence their anachronistic existence in the Millennium markets officially does come to an end.

**stroyal** · April 26th, 2010, 06:29 PM

Oh no.
I'm almost embarrassed to say, I still use them.
I just hate burning a CD for something as small as a program like memtest86.
I know they are probably cheaper than a floppy, but it is just the thought of wasting all that space.
I guess it time for me to enter the 21st century

**tony_j15** · April 26th, 2010, 06:32 PM

yeah, I use to keep a few around for memtest, seatools, etc. Now I have a CD-RW on hand and many motherboards let you boot from jump drives, so the floppy has long past its usefulness.
RIP, though. Remember when games use to come on 3.5's and it was so much cooler than the 5's? VGA graphics!!!! yeah!

**stroyal** · April 26th, 2010, 06:42 PM

If I'm not mistaken, my first IBM had two 5s, DOS on one and a word processor on the other.

Can anyone imagine an operating system, or a word processor that small now?

**Imperion1** · April 26th, 2010, 10:58 PM

I still use them occasionally.
Use them for small files or booting to a DOS prompt.
They're good for using with SATA drivers, cause it seems like whenever I try to install Windows (any version from XP and up), the install always looks for the driver on a floppy.
I have 3 running computers, all with floppy drives installed. And I have about 75 blank floppy disks or more.
What can I say, I'm nastalgic. Heck, I have an Atari 1200xl somewhere and 5" floppies. I gotta find that just for Wiz-Of-War, Joust, Pac-man, and a few other games I used to play. And the text adventure games were always good. The ones that you would type in from Compute, Analog, and Antic magazines.
Ah, the good old days, when gas was 72c a gallon and the A-team was on.