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Farewell floppy's - But the less said about PC World the better - Last time i went in there they were trying to sell 1m of Cat5e cable for £8.99!

I'm still rockin a floppy drive. I used it to install my F6 RAID drivers and update my BIOS.
I agree they're generally useless anymore though. So long floppies! Thanks for all the fond memories (click... click... click)

Fortunately one should still be able to find AOL floppys sitting around just about anywhere.

Floppies stopped being useful when PC's learned to boot from USB connected flash memory.

That said, to make my USB stick bootable, I did have to use a floppy emulator to make a bootable disk image that I could extract the boot sector from and write to the USB stick.

When Windows allows you to "format" a flash stick as bootable, then floppies will really be dead.

Goodbye and good riddance. I wish I had a 20$ bill for everytime I had somebody bring me a floppy disk and ask if I could recover the data off of it for them. "But my college paper I worked on for 2 months was on that disk!" ARGH!!!

I recently over heard an employee from a company down the hall from my office trying to convince his boss to buy a camera because it had floppy disks and everyone has floppy disks. His boss actually agreed. These guys are going to be screwed.

"and film camera"

bull ***** it's dead

I'm amazed. I assumed that even big computer stores stopped selling floppies some time ago.

They say they will stop selling when the inventory runs out?

So technically, floppies will be available forever, because nobody in their right mind buys them anymore.

Even as CD, DVD drives, and USB memory keys are bootable, a floppy drive & floppy bootdisc are still a resort when you need to get your computer running in dire times.

Film camera? Excuse me? I say Nay Nay. Sure the pros don't use it as much (digital is faster and cheaper, pure and simple), but I doubt that film photography will ever truly go the way of the dodo, the VFS, or (eventually) Blu-Ray. It is a fading art, but I feel that it will be kept alive for many more years as a wonderful artist's medium.

/and a floppy drive, even an external one, is still a necessity.

"..and the film camera.."

Uh, what? Since when was the film camera scraped? I could have sworn there was a LONG line at Wallgreens the other day.

No ***** way film is gone, 35mm will be around forever.

"But floppies hold only 1.44mb of data – now little more than a single song, one high resolution picture or a few dozen word-only documents."

What is their idea of a high-res pic?
Or a song size?

I don't consider floppies dead, really. In a server environment, messing with raid, they can be quite handy in my experience. Granted, a lot of times there are better alternatives... However, some people still use them and need them - so I don't think they'll be fully dead for some time to come. It is hard to believe I will see floppy discs stripped from all computer stores anytime soon. :)

Well, I'm not worried about a shortage... I have a good 1500+ 3.5 inchers sittin in my closet here (Windows 3.11 was the shizz... had to have them floppies).

Is it me, or is the build quality of current floppys terrible? I have often seen as half a box of disks be unusable.. not all of my computers support boot from usb yet..

I honestly didn't know anybody was even buying these anymore. My 1gb iPod Shuffle that I no longer use for music has worked more than fine... *Shrugs*

I noticed the other day that I've started removing floppy drives from any computer I am working on. They have no purpose anymore. R.I.P.

I bought an external when I built my new computer...just in case. It has left the box twice.

Out with the old...in with the new.

Floppy drives have not been included with computers for a few years now. This is true for Dell and has been the case with Apple for many many years.

So, one store stops sells of Floppys and it's dead? Give me a break.

Still need film cameras for folks like my parents and their friends. Whenever they use their dit-cams they just pass them around to show their pix to their friends through the view finder, that's it. It's funny to watch all these oldsters passing their cams around.

You can probably get floppies if you wanted, the stock wont run out for another 10 years. (Who uses floppies?)

"Only 700million floppies were sold globally last year – down from 2billion in 1998"
Uh, what? So the sales has gone down only 65% in 9 years???

Anyway, my fondest memory has to be drilling holes in those 720k DD floppies in order to make them 1.4Mb HD ones :)
Yes, it works.

Good riddance. It's embarrassing that they're still in use.

Floppies are not dead. There are a serious amount of musicians out there - myself included who use floppies to carry midi information and trigger sound modules and keyboards for live performances. Given the choice of spending potentially a few thousand dollars to update my equipment or finding an alternative source for floppies, I'll take the alternative source.

Farewell waning products of yesteryear!

Bet it won't stop PC manufacturers from installing the drives in PCs.
Odd.

Remember when Apple killed the floppy disk in 1996?

The author seemed to at least have some clue until the last line in the article when he compares the floppy to Beta-Max. The floppy was one of the most successful media formats ever! The reason is still hasn't completely died is because it is still useful in some applications. Beta-Max and floppy shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath.

It was an excellent early example of the power that standardized media could offer.

Nothing in life has let me down as many times as floppy disks have. Good riddance.

It might be interesting to note that on the 9th anniversary of the iMac - the first personal computer to give the floppy the heave-ho - we're finally bidding the little bastards farewell.

The floppy will never truly die until motherboards come pre-configured to boot off USB, and the price of flash drives comes down. When I worked an assembly line, we stuck floppies in each computer and put them on the rack for a 48-hour burn-in. The time it would take to boot each individual one up and configure it to boot from USB would kill our productivity. We would have as many as 40 computers on burn-in at one time. That would be pretty expensive if we used flash drives.

For some reason I cannot click out of this dumb comments page... Though as a last message, I'm glad they're gone (Hopefully they'll stay that way) Rest in peace with vacuum tubes and punch cards, until a new generation of hipsters says goodbye to CDs, and begin to use PenisDrives, Or PussySticks. Who knows.

"– and 98 per cent of PCs no longer have an A-drive."

maybe new PCs, but definitely not all computers

The floppy will still live on health support. That meaning old-school people will still use it. Plus you need it for all old computers. (Setting it up, booting etc)

I guess their millions of shoppers have absolutely no need for a boot disk? I find that hard to beleive.

Maybe all us hackers still have a stack of 100 misc. floppies laying around to use? I have used the same disks for a while now, but if they all started having too many bad sectors it would suck to think it would be hard to get new ones.

USB keys and CDroms are not valid replacements. Nothing is as simple as booting from a floppy to flash a bios or whatever... You need to need to actually boot your primary OS to write to a CD... and USB support in DOS is flakey as is boot from USB support on motherboards.

You won't see me building a PC without a floppy drive any time soon.

The USB killed the floppy drive star...

"Don't copy that floppy" campaign finally works out

bury

Don't copy that floppy!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4837609090332617729

RIP

i still remember when Dell didn't install floppy drives as a standard option.

"WTF, no more floppy, i can't afford a flash drive"