Floppy disk finally killed off by Sony

By Harry Wallop
Consumer Affairs Editor
Published: 2:37PM BST
26 Apr 2010

The Japanese electronics manufacturer, which last year sold well over 12 million of the devices, has announced it will stop making floppy disks next year, leaving no serious manufacturer in the market place.

The decision is the final nail in the coffin for floppies, which since they were first developed in 1971 have helped consumers store documents, pictures and data on an easy to use format.

There were 12 million sold in Japan last year. Though this amounts one for every four households in Japan, the combined storage capacity of all these disks, most of which had not much more than 1MB capacity, totalled just 17 terabytes of data.

By 1996, there were an estimated 5 billion floppy disks in use thanks to the fact that most computer programmes up to this point were installed and backed up on these devices.