Floppy disks finally get the retail chop

It said that it will not replenish stocks when they run out due to a lack of demand. It also helps that 98 per cent of the PCs it sells no longer come with a floppy drive.

Old people will remember this as the 'A:' drive. I was a little surprised by the news though, not because I had harboured some great love of the floppy, but because I thought they'd died out long ago. Seemingly not. Global sales were two billion in 1998, down to 700 million last year. That drop of two-thirds is being used as a reason to back away from the media. Personally, I'm even more shocked that 700 million of them sold last year.

I remember being very excited by 3.5in floppy disks. I realise a statement like that makes me sound ancient but I'm not really. Think of IT years being like dog years. It was the tail-end of the 1980s and I had my first scribbling job in a place where the cupboards were filled with typewriters, that had recently been replaced by PCs with 5.25in floppy drives. I should point out here that older hacks saw early PCs as little more than dog turds. On visiting the office, they'd carefully sidestep those new fangled PC thingies and make straight for the cupboard for a good old fashioned typewriter.

We used a word processing package called Samna, if anyone remembers it, and worked in Dos with funky green lettering on a black background. Stories written were mainly saved to 5.25in floppy disks which were then fired across the room ‘a la Frisbee' to the editor. This could be partly blamed for the notorious delicacy of the format. I lost more than my share of articles to those bendy bastards.

So, when we moved to systems with 3.5in disks, it was a momentous occasion. Picture a visit from the Pope, the Queen or the cast of Debbie Does Dallas - whichever tweaks your speedometer. They weren't floppy and they didn't fly half as well as their 5.25in predecessors but, they did tend to be a bit more robust. So much so that we relied on them more and fooled ourselves into thinking that finally here was a storage device that would save and cherish our stories every day, without fail. You know where this is going. The 3.5in proved not to be perfect after all. That metal shutter, which helped make the disk more robust and keep the dust out, also had a tendency to bend outwards if treated badly. Like I said, they never flew as well as the 5.25in disks - less floating and more hurtling, like a nerd's shuriken star slamming into the wall above the editors ear. ‘Oops, sorry' was a popular refrain in that office.

The biggest difference, for me, was on the gaming and application front. More and more games and software started coming on these sturdy little disks and it made life so much easier than the older floppies. Some games even came with five or six disks which was both great, and a source of concern. You see, the more disks there were, the more likely one of them could be botched and after 15 minutes of loading, things would grind to a halt with a read error of some sort on Disk 5. I still have the 3.5in floppy version of the original Warcraft. Mention that to anyone today, especially the millions of World of Warcraft players under a certain age, and they'd look at you blankly: ‘Floppy wot?'

I was really glad when Zip drives emerged, followed by blank CDs, while blank 4.7GB DVDs are light years from the 1.44MB of storage for 3.5in floppies. In storage terms, 1.44MB is nothing now. A few Jessica Simpson shots and you're bust, so to speak.

There were no MP3s then though, nor widespread music files for that matter, nor digital photos, nor an Internet to be surfing and downloading things from. So, 1.44MB was plenty for text files and a bit of code. I tend to take storage capacities for granted now but it wasn't all that long ago when 1.44MB was more than you would ever need.

Still not sorry to see the back of them, though. µ