PC World, one of Europe's largest computer retailers has finally announced the end of the floppy disc with it no longer re-stocking on floppy discs once its existing stocks have sold off. By the summer, the retailer expects to stop offering PCs and laptops with floppy drives fitted as standard. Apple was the first to no longer ship floppy drives in its computers with the introduction of the iMac back in 1998. Dell dropped the floppy drive from its Dell Dimension range in 2003.
The 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive seems to be the only thing hardware component has managed to continue to sell unchanged up until today. For example, while there have been improvements such as the 2.88MB and LS-120 (120MB) floppy drives and many competitors such as the Zip drive, the original 1.44MB drive has remained the most popular. The first 3.5" Floppy Disk was developed by Sony and sold in 1981.
While CD-RW drives originally tried competing with the floppy with their much greater capacity with 650MB CD-RW holding about 470 floppy discs worth of data, they were not as user friendly for everyday use. For example, one could not save directly on a disc without 3rd party packet writing software (such as DirectCD). Such packet written discs required a driver to read back the contents (at least in Earlier OS's). Finally, while Mt Rainer tried solving this, very few optical drive manufacturers took on the technology. In the end, the floppy drive was the only thing one knew was guaranteed to read & write in almost every PC, at least up until recent years.
Unfortunately, with the extremely limited 1.44MB capacity of floppy discs, it has been superseded by USB Flash memory drives, which are available in capacities as high as 8GB. Unlike optical drives and other removable disk drives, flash memory cards are only dependant on a USB port to be present with Windows 2000 or later, which means that users will not have to worry about a PC having something to read and never mind write to their media. The only drawback was the inability to boot from USB flash drives in older PCs and many floppy disk boot and image tools being dependant on a floppy drive to be present.
