That old standby of data storage, the floppy disk, appears to have now joined tape storage and punch cards on the scrap heap of computer history. It was announced today that PC World, one of the biggest retailers of computer equipment in the UK, will no longer stock the ubiquitous 3.5″ disks once their current supply runs out (source: BBC News), making them the first major chain worldwide to officially discontinue support for the longtime lingua franca of storage media.

It’s not like this hasn’t been coming for a long time anyway. Many modern PCs don’t even ship with a floppy drive anymore, and let’s face it — with floppies holding a maximum of about 1.44MB, they’ve long been rendered irrelevant in this modern world of USB thumbdrives and rewritable DVD media. Even more modern advances in the technology, such as ZIP disks, cannot compare price-wise or reliability-wise to inexpensive thumbdrives. At Micro Center, $25, or about the cost of two 10-packs of 3.5″ HD diskettes, will get you a USB drive holding two gigabytes. 2GB on a single unit vs. about 25-30MB spread out across twenty units… you don’t need to be a MENSA member to figure that one out.

So, it’s hail and farewell to our old friend. But what a legacy it leaves behind. Floppy disks were the first major media format for the home computer that wasn’t inherited from another technology (which rules out the cassette tapes used by the likes of the Timex-Sinclair 1000 or the early Commodore computers), and eventually became as well-known to the expanding computer culture of the 1980s as DVDs are to movie lovers today.

Floppy disks have gotten physically smaller over the years, but have also somewhat paradoxically been able to hold more data as they’ve “shrunk.” The first 8″ disks could only hold 80-175K; these gave way to the famous 5.25″ disks (best known to users of the 8-bit computers of the ’80s) that held about 360K, and eventually to the modern 3.5″ disk that holds 1.44MB.

There’s even some confusion among the younger crowd as to why, if they’re hard plastic squares, they’re referred to as floppy disks. They don’t realize that the term actually refers to the thin sheet contained within the plastic, just like a videocassette contains a spool of magnetic tape.

The modern floppy was developed in 1987 and first entered the market in the early 1990s, but has remained stagnant ever since. There have been attempts over the years to upgrade the format to be able to store more data as technology and file sizes increased; perhaps the most commercially successful attempt to do this was the IOmega ZIP drive, an incompatible floppy format that could hold (originally) about 100MB per disk. ZIP disks were popular for a time in the ’90s, and eventually recieved upgrades to 250MB and finally 750MB, but the relatively high cost of the media and reliability issues (such as the infamous “Click Of Doom” that haunts the nightmares of many a ZIP-disk user) doomed it as a floppy replacement. Another ultimately failed floppy format was the LS-120 “Superdrive,” which was backwards-compatible with standard 3.5″ disks but could also use 120MB Superdisks. Unfortunately, in practice Superdisks proved to be even less reliable than ZIP disks, and it completely failed to catch on in the marketplace. And this doesn’t even touch the odd 3″ or 2.5″ disks used by some dedicated word processors (such as the famous Brother models) during the late ’80s…

Some have asked, why do we still need floppies in this day and age? Up until a few years ago they were the only real way to boot into your computer in case of catastrophic OS failure, and a bootable CD was not an option. Although it has to be considered a “weapon of last resort” today, it is possible to use a floppy to boot into an unresponsive system and fix whatever may be causing the OS not to boot. (Many Linux distributions, in fact, still prompt you to create a “rescue floppy” during their installation process for just this sort of emergency.) They are also universal; an unfamiliar computer may or may not have a CD/DVD writer or an accessible USB port for a thumbdrive, but they would almost certainly have a 3.5″ drive, allowing for easy, if bulky, “sneakernet” file transfer between computers.

But time and technology has moved on. In today’s world, the humble 3.5″ disk just doesn’t cut it anymore for any serious form of data storage; you can still store text files and small documents on them, but they won’t even hold a moderately-sized MP3. Being a principally analog and electromechanical technology, they are highy susceptible to “bit rot” and prone to breakdown after lengthy periods without use, making their value as archival media virtually nil. And it is now much more expensive to produce a floppy disk than it is to make a purely digital storage device like a thumbdrive. Despite all of this, the format has held on by its fingernails as formats have evolved from floppies to CDs to DVDs to now Blu-Ray, to become the longest-running computer media format in history.

So on the eve of its final extinction, let’s raise our cans/bottles/glasses of Dew and toast the floppy disk… the medium that helped launch an industry.

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