Hard times

So, PC World has decided to let stocks of floppy disks run out. And that will be the end of it.

Only yesterday I finally donated a CopyPro disk copier, purchased in the early 90s for a substantial 4-figure sum, to a worthy recipient who runs jumble sales of PC stuff. In its heyday it was used to produce thousands of copies per month. Now it is worthless.

The death of the floppy disk has been a long time coming and it deserves a suitable obituary. Although the best-known floppy format was the 3½-inch 1.44Mb version, did you know that the first, 1969, floppy was the 8-inch IBM 23FD (read-only) with 81.7 kb capacity? or that it reached the dizzy heights of 200 MB capacity in 1998 with the HiFD? It’s all there in the Wikipedia (rely on that if you will). In South Africa, the 3½-inch floppy is/was known as a “stiffy” – ie somewhat less flexible than the classic 5¼-inch floppy popularised by the IBM PC in the mid 80s.

3 thoughts on “Hard times

  1. A client in our offices yesterday asked me if I had a floppy. What would have been a normal request not so long ago had me laughing. It has been a while since I have used floppy disk so it wasn’t the first thing that sprang to mind. Call me nostalgic if you will but I will miss the 3 1/2 inch floppy…and the jokes.

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