Floppy disk sales still going strong

[evwhore]

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

Comments

[dmorr]

Of the three active and 3 inactive computers in the house, not one has a floppy drive.

And that doesn't even count the iphones or incoming ipad.

[evwhore]

Of my 2 desktops actually turned on, only 1 has a floppy. There are also 2 inactive machines, of which 1 has a floppy. My primary laptop does not; the obsolete laptop does.

[ts4z]

Only one of my boxes, my circa-2001 Windows box, has a floppy.

Except, of course, the Apple IIe, which has two, and the Commodore 64, which has 4, but they probably don't work.

Finding blank 5 1/4s is a *bitch*.

[adbjupe]

I'd agree that various devices in the industry still use them. Our computer industry may want to make us believe in a 3 year technology renewal cycle, but other industries don't. At Qimonda we were using this big chip testing devices the size of a car. We had a stack of Sun sparcstation 5 and 10's for spare parts, since that was the only hardware the tester software was certified on. Those 2 machines were declared end of live in 98. I am sure when Texas Instruments bought the equipment from our fab to set up their fab in Dallas, some of those Sun's were on the truck as well.

Check out ebay for a historic collection of them :)

[jigsawn]

Floppies are for those whippersnappers! Back in my day we used punch cards...