That versatile piece of plastic-covered tape that most of us grew up with is going away. PC World, one of the largest commercial retailers in Europe, announced it will stop selling floppy disks as soon as their existing inventory is depleted. Dell Computers stopped putting floppy disk drives in their computers four years ago.
Hey, floppies aren’t that bad. I even remember using 5¼” disks when I first started using computers. I was carried around a stack of floppies for some time as it was the way to backup your files. My wife, who started a new job today, threw away a stack of floppies partly because of the article, and partly because it was unclear if the material could even be retrieved or read today.
Of course, the new preferred medium for backup today is the CD-ROM. But I will still hold a soft (hard?) spot for that little piece of plastic that held my Word Perfect documents, my Lotus 1-2-3 “documents,” and backups / saved games from games that had been loaded on my Commodore 64 from those 5¼” floppies.
And let us not forget Matthew Broderick’s extensive use of floppies (the big ones) in playing “global thermonuclear war” in the classic 80s hit, War Games.
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