Although the herald of the end for history’s most popular electronic storage system came at the end of the 90′s, the floppy disks’ death was written down only a bit earlier this month. Indeed, the last of the mohicans, the last floppy disk manufacturer (Sony), announced that by next year its production of floppy disks would cease completely.

This was but the confirmation of a necessity after the last producer of floppy disk drives (HP) announced a year earlier that it would neither support nor produce drivers and they would no longer be present on its systems.

The decadence of the age of the floppy disk started however much earlier, in 1998 to be exact, when Apple produced the first iMac with no floppy disk drive. Since then, many systems’ producers followed suit excluding floppy disk drives from the standard configurations. Dell did so in 2003, as did Toshiba. In fact 2003 was the year when most system assemblers took out the floppy disk drive from their configurations. In 2004, even I denounced the old storage device and used a floppy for the last time.

Since then, the floppy disk was artificially kept alive by legacy systems as well its use in other devices (such as music synthesizers). Sales declined steadily with the advent of USB memory sticks and when these became bootable, excuses to keep a stack of system floppy disks faded giving a final push over the edge.

If this sounds as an obituary, then you should know it is. As an IT specialist, the floppy was many times a trusted companion and aid. Despite its flaws and now insignificant storage space, the floppy disk kept going, walking proudly over new technologies (such as Iomega’s ZipDrive and the SuperDisk, both offering faster and larger storage). Today, the icon of the floppy disk is the symbol for the “save” function in most software applications – a reminder of the role of the floppy.

Farewell.