Farewell to Sony’s 3.5-inch Floppy Disks

Published on April 26th,2010 at 3:21 PM
By >Akihabara News Team

Farewell to Sony’s 3.5-inch Floppy Disks

Category: Storage - Tags: Floppy disc, Sony

SOny 3.5" floppy discs

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.

P.S. I guess most of you, just like I did, are already surprised to know that they still have been selling in this day and age. In fact, Sony are reportedly sold around 12 million discs in the Japanese market in 2009.

Via Sony Japan

6 Comments

Category Storage

Farewell to Sony’s 3.5-inch Floppy Disks

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http://www.kurcafe.de Josef

I still have Bootdisks here for my Server. Never mind that they sell so much Disks in 2009.
Sakaphoto

I remember seeing a three way test around 1982 of the original Sony 3.5 inch without the auto shutter, the Hitachi 3 inch, and the Dysan 3.25 inch drives.

The first time I saw one in use was in an Apple Macintosh in 1984. I’ve seen them in a lot of different kinds of equipment from IBM networking boxes to Sony’s Mavica series digital cameras. Coming from tradition 8 inch or 5.25 inch floppies, they were great.

It is surprising that they’ve been making and selling them so long after Apple dropped them in 1998 and Intel dropped them from reference designs shortly after that.
G

That’s a bummer. Not to be weird but I still use them on some of my equipment. That gear does not support USB or other media. I’m a fan of older technology. Some of the new stuff won’t do what I need.
http://anderson360 sacredbird

that’s awesome. you mean all the old diskettes i have at home will one day become collector items??
Cynthia

I know it sounds dorky, but I had a “funeral” for the floppy disk.

I filmed the entire thing:

http://www.thecynch.com/video-funeral-for-a-floppy/

-Cynthia
http://sharp.cheeseus.org Stefan

Last month I had to update my BIOS. I spent a week looking for a diskette, found a Sony one in the end, and did the job. I have a relatively old motherboard (2008) and system so I couldn’t update the BIOS via USB. The diskette was much preferred to a CD, because the update procedure included writing a backup of the previous BIOS, which would be impossible if I used a CD.

Anyway, everybody else has got a flashy new computer so, yeah, bye-bye diskettes!

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