As someone who was introduced to computers in the mid 1980′s around second grade, I have many a memory of floppy disks, how expensive blank ones were and how much fun it was to go to a shareware convention to get new games and programs. By the mid to late 1990′s you couldn’t open your mailbox without seeing an AOL floppy offering free internet access.

The floppy was essential to install Windows and needed all the way through Windows 2000 as an all important boot disk. Today, computers no longer come with the A: drive anymore. Only storing 1.44mb of data on the 3.5″ floppy is hardly enough for just about anything of importance. An average digital camera of 6mp stores a JPG file nearly twice the size of a floppy, an average MP3 song is nearly 3 times the size.

After 36 years and billions of sales later, the floppy is being killed off. As soon as the current supply in warehouses are depleted, that will be the end, no more are being produced. Sadly, I still know several businesses that are running DOS based computer systems and rely on these drives, so there will be some value to them for at least the next few years. Long live the floppy!