CNET reports that Sony, which has 70% of the market with floppies (and that’s nothing to brag about), is going to stop selling floppies in Japan as of March 2011. This means this positively ancient data storage medium is finally going away. You’ve seen floppies for sale at Wal-Mart, Target and other dept. stores and couldn’t figure out why they were there. Blame Sony as they were the ones still making them. After they stop, the floppy should very quickly disappear from the shelves.
Some quick questions answered for our younger readers.
Why is it called a floppy?
It’s a nickname for “floppy diskette”.
Why is it called a diskette?
That’s meant to denote a smaller version of a hard disk. You have a disk, then the diskette. This is similar to cigar and cigarette.
Why is it called a floppy when it’s not physically floppy?
The predecessor 5.25-inch floppy diskette was flexible. And in fact the 3.5-inch diskette media was flexible as well, but the casing was not. Technically speaking, calling a 3.5-inch floppy diskette a floppy is accurate.
What’s the “CH” imprinted next to the flap?
You’re reading it upside down. It’s “HD”, meaning high-density. Prior to that was double-density, which sounds like more than high-density, but it wasn’t.
What was the first floppy diskette?
A large honkin’ 8-inch format called IBM 23FD, introduced in 1971. It was read-only. One year after that came the Memorex 650 in 1972, also an 8-inch. It had read/write capability.
The first 5.25-inch was the Shugart SA 400, introduced in 1976.
The first 3.5-inch was made by HP in 1982, single-sided of course.
3.5-inch high-density floppy disks came about in 1987.
Was 1.44MB the largest amount of data that could be stored on a floppy?
No. There was the 2.88MB, also introduced in 1987, the “Floptical” which could store 21MB, the LS-120 which could store 120MB, the LS-240 which could store 240MB and a Sony proprietary format called HiFD, which could store 150MB or 200MB.
Is the Zipdisk format a floppy?
Although never called as such, technically it is because the storage medium inside the hard case is flexible.
Why didn’t the larger format floppy formats ever truly replace the 1.44MB 3.5-inch?
A few reasons.
The media for anything other than a 1.44MB was prohibitively expensive, not to mention replacing your floppy disk drive with a special format was also priced too high.
All operating system diskettes were either on 5.25 or 3.5-inch diskettes. If the replacement FDD you used wasn’t backward compatible, you couldn’t reinstall your operating system.
If you used a special format of floppy, you were usually the only one who had it. This means you couldn’t share data with anybody because they didn’t have the same FDD you did.
Compact Discs were a much better solution because you had 650MB at your disposal (later bumped to 700MB), they wrote faster and you could install a burner drive without touching the floppy drive. Furthermore the industry readily distributed newer software titles on CD, so there was added familiarity as well with the format.
My take on floppy disks
Happy to see them go. I always hated them. 
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