Today marks the day Sony has decided to stop producing their 3.5″ floppy disk.  To all of you asking “People still use those?” the answer is yes, especially in Japan.  Sony reports that they sold 12 million, (yes, million) floppy disks in Japan in 2009.  They are still commonly used in Japan and India with Sony holding 70% of the market share.  The decision to retire the floppy disk is the result of declining sales from 47 million in 2002 to 12 million last year.

Other storage media like USB drives, DVDs and Blu-ray discs offer more storage capacity than floppy disks that hold less than 2 MB of memory.  Don’t worry to all you beloved fans of this storage disk, you’ll be able to buy them until March 2011.

I bid farewell to the floppy disk; you had a great 29-year run and were there for me many times as a kid.