News today that Sony is stopping production of the old 3.5 diskette, the infamous 'floppy', (misnamed of course as it wasn't actually floppy).   It's a bit sad, but, when I went to find some to photograph for this article, I had to look long and hard to track them down, and that's an immediate confirmation that yes,  they're simply not around any longer!  Gone are the days we computer techs used to carry our special sets of disks around, with libraries of everything we might ever want.

As with all eulogies, it's time to be a bit sentimental.  Recalling the day I upgraed m old home computer from a cassette storage to a 5-1/4 single sided disks.  Then learning you could simoply cut a notch out of the side, the r/o notch, and make them double-sided (720Kb!! back when that seemed like a lot).  And then we got these new 3-1/2 disks, with 720Kb, or later, a massive 1.44Mb.  Software would ship on them, in fact somewhere I still have sets of Office 4 and Office 95 on the full 20+ floppy disks!  Always a frustration when one of the disks halfway through had an error!

Rest in peace old friend!!  But I'm not sure we'll miss you! 

(for a more authorative history of floppy disks, hit wikipedia)  And for true aficionados, don't stress - Imation and Memorex are still manufacturing, although clearly the writing is on the wall.