Tech: The Floppy's Demise - Details

When Apple launched its 3 1/2" floppy as standard issue with the new Macintosh computer in 1984, it seemed revolutionary at the time, eliminating the need for the sleeve. Only a few years later, everyone had switched to dual-sided, 800 kB disks, and in 1987, both were replaced by the 1.44 MB disk that has remained the standard ever since.

The last gasp for these formats were the various magneto-optical drives, all of which ultimately failed, and the Zip drive, which had a brief flowering in the late 90's; but various technical problems and the plummeting cost of CD-R drives and media (a good CD-R burner in 1993 would set you back around $5,000, but by decade's end, they were no more than $200 or so) killed all of them. The first death knell really came with the floppyless iMac, in 1998; Dell followed suit five years later by announcing the end of floppies as a standard item.

Two weeks ago, I was at Fry's in Fountain Valley, idly looking for the old drives; the pile was now a tiny corner, and I expect soon, even that redoubt of the hard-core geek won't carry them. You'll have to head over to the electronics salvage yards to get the drives, and good luck finding new media. It seems epochal; yet just the other day I was lamenting just how little storage there is on a 4.7 GB DVD-R disk. When I was in high school, a tape containing 20 MB seemed to have more than a man would ever need. In the room next door, my wife's studio has over a terabyte of storage, and even that looks tiny when one Seagate drive holds 750 GB. Zowie.