Digital Home Thoughts: The Floppy Keeps Selling and Selling

"However, Verbatim, a UK manufacturer which makes more than a quarter of the floppies sold in the UK, says it sells hundreds of thousands of them a month. It sells millions more in Europe. "We've been discussing the death of the floppy for 14 years, ever since CD technology first started coming on strong," says Verbatim spokesman Kevin Jefcoate."

The memories the 3.5" floppy elicits are wonderful and date me. There is a generation to whom floppy disks are as archaic as 8-track tapes and vacuum tubes. In their heyday, they were capacious and useful, much like flash drives are now. They also were so cheap that passing them around and giving them away was of little concern. I suspect that in the personal computing world, floppy disks are largely dead thanks for flash drives and the cloud. It is for specialized applications that they are still around. Certain equipment that have a life span of decades, instead of years, still use the disks, and as rugged as these things are, they do need replacing once in a while. I am glad they are mostly gone though; their transfer speeds are agonizingly slow. Anyone who still uses them better stock up! There is no telling when the other manufacturers will stop making them entirely!