Say It Ain’t So: Sony to Discontinue Making Floppy Disks

Funny, The Station had thought the floppy disk was put to sleep back in the early days of the George Dubya Bush administration. Guess not.

Sony, apparently a laggard among IT-related vendors, announced April 26 that it has decided to stop making the little 3.5-inch square, plastic-encased disks that actually are not floppy at all — at least not like those REALLY old ones we used to use in those Apple II machines back in the 1980s. Those you could literally flop around, if so inspired. You could fan yourself with them.

Sony cited a “lack of demand” in deciding to shut down its floppy-making operation. What? No demand for a 1.44MB storage disk, which could theoretically hold a few photos or one very short MP3, like the 30-second “think” song for “Jeopardy” or the theme song for “Scrubs”? Impossible to believe.

Still, Sony’s not giving up on the venerable storage medium right away. The company said it will keep its production lines running for one more year, giving those who still use them time to think about moving to, um, say, flash drives or disk drives.

So if you know people working in the floppy disk factory, their jobs are safe for a short while, at least.

We can’t imagine how Sony sold 12 million floppies (in Japan alone) in 2009, but at least a few people are a bit behind the times. How old must their computers be?

Admittedly, we have a few of these little guys still lounging around The Station. Maybe we’ll ask them how they feel about all this and get back to you sometime.