Is the end nigh for the floppy disk? You bet!

I’m showing my age, but I remember the time when simply having a floppy disk drive attached to your computer was a big deal. I’m too scared to calculate how many hours of my life were wasted waiting for my Commodore 64, and later Amiga 500, to load software from the agonizingly slow floppy disk drives of the 1980s.

Goodbye old friend

Now the floppy disk is on the verge of being obsolete and redundant, a fact underscored by an announcement by Britain’s largest chain of computer superstores, PC World, that it will no longer stock floppy disks.

PC World expects floppy disk stocks to be gone in weeks, if not earlier.

Predictably, the retailer said that the reason why it is not reordering any more floppy is because they do not hold enough data and there are better alternatives. That being, of course, the increasingly ubiquitous USB flash drive. The price of flash drives continues to come down, even as capacities continue to rise. 

PC World spokesperson Hamish Thompson is reported as saying that the floppy disk has ”had a good, long and productive life, but really, it’s just too small to hold any real data. It just doesn’t make sense any more.”

Of course Thompson is absolutely right. The 1.44 megabyte capacity of the 3.25 inch floppy disk, which was released in 1984, reflects a different time when you could, for example, fit all your personal files on a couple of floppy disks, and complete commercial games came on one, two or three floppy disks.

Now days, just one audio track is typically 3 to 4 Mb, while a one hour video could be 300 Mb or more. The floppy disk just doesn’t cut it.

With companies routinely giving out flash drives as promotional gifts, and the street price of high-capacity flash drives well under $50, most people have at least one or two USB flash drives in their top drawer. So really, what is the point of the floppy disk? (Except of course for legacy equipment.)

Still, for me as an old guy, the floppy disk will always be a reminder of my mispent youth tinkering with Commodore 64s and Amigas.

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