Funeral for a (Floppy) Friend

Earlier this week, Sony announced that they were, in fact, not going to produce new 3.5″ disks. The venerable format began in the early 80’s and reached the height of its popularity in the mid-90’s. I can’t recall the last time I actually used a floppy disk – it’s been so long…

Back in those days, users would dance the “floppy shuffle”, which referred to the frequent swapping of floppy disks during a typical software install from that period. It was not uncommon in some cases to swap between 10 to 15 discs for some of the larger apps of that era.

I do remember buying a ton of 3.5″ disks (800k variety) for my Apple IIGS. When I moved to a PC, I bought 1.44MB floppies. The last machine I purchased that came with a floppy disk drive was my first desktop Mac, a PowerComputing PowerTower 180e, back in 1996.

Technology marches on, but I’ll always have my memories. What was your first machine with the floppy disk? What was your last? Sound off in the comments below!

-Krishna