Sony finally discontinues floppy discs

Were they still making these?

Sony has finally discontinued the manufacture of floppy discs in Japan. Most kids in highschool today probably have never seen one of these. Makes me feel old. I can remember when PC games used to be stored on them. More complicated classic games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter required six or more of these 1.44 megabyte discs to install. I can even remember using the big 5 1/4” discs to load programs on the Apple IIGS computers we had in elementary school.

The death of the floppy came in 1998 when Apple shipped the original iMac without the iconic drive. Steve Jobs said that network storage and recordable CDs would replace them. I got my first CD-RW drive in 2001 and never looked back. Since then, they’ve been regulated to niche markets in computer repair and developing countries. With flash drive prices down to a few tenths of a cent per megabyte, they make little sense these days.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We fondly remember the floppy and all the work he did storing all that early low res porn and school book reports. May he enjoy the afterlife for all eternity.