Floppy disk sales still going strong
via slashdot, although Sony has announced it will stop producing 3.5" floppies, Verbatim is still making and selling them in surprising numbers:
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.
[...]
There are a few instances for which floppies remain the norm, like the specialist, high-value technology that may rely on floppy drives for data.
The vast desks that control the light shows and sounds settings in theatres or music venues have until recently come with floppy drives as standard; the English National Opera is just one example of an organisation that uses them.
A volunteer at the National Museum of Computing says that many scientific instruments -- so-called dataloggers, oscilloscopes and the like -- record their data onto floppies.
This kind of expensive equipment is made to last, to be bought infrequently -- and these gadgets may call for at least a few floppies in their lifetimes.
But these relatively niche uses couldn't possibly account for the number of floppies -- something like a million a month -- that are being consumed in the UK alone.
The answer may simply be that there are a great many old computers that read only floppies, and a great many computer users that have no need for the storage media that have supplanted them in other quarters.
I think it was a couple of years ago my boss remarked to me that "for being a dead technology, we sure go through a lot of floppy disks." I forget what we were using them for. Some were for boot disks for safety purposes for Linux boxes, or driver disks for various network cards etc. that came on floppy-sized image files that had to be written out to a floppy. Other than that I really can't recall. But since then our consumption has dropped to basically zero.
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.
[...]
There are a few instances for which floppies remain the norm, like the specialist, high-value technology that may rely on floppy drives for data.
The vast desks that control the light shows and sounds settings in theatres or music venues have until recently come with floppy drives as standard; the English National Opera is just one example of an organisation that uses them.
A volunteer at the National Museum of Computing says that many scientific instruments -- so-called dataloggers, oscilloscopes and the like -- record their data onto floppies.
This kind of expensive equipment is made to last, to be bought infrequently -- and these gadgets may call for at least a few floppies in their lifetimes.
But these relatively niche uses couldn't possibly account for the number of floppies -- something like a million a month -- that are being consumed in the UK alone.
The answer may simply be that there are a great many old computers that read only floppies, and a great many computer users that have no need for the storage media that have supplanted them in other quarters.
I think it was a couple of years ago my boss remarked to me that "for being a dead technology, we sure go through a lot of floppy disks." I forget what we were using them for. Some were for boot disks for safety purposes for Linux boxes, or driver disks for various network cards etc. that came on floppy-sized image files that had to be written out to a floppy. Other than that I really can't recall. But since then our consumption has dropped to basically zero.