Floppy disk

Forty years of the disk everyone saved to, from the IBM 8-inch to the last 3.5-inch Sony boxes in 2011

Shut down
19902026

The floppy disk was the removable magnetic storage medium of personal computing: the 8-inch IBM disk of 1971, the 5.25-inch Shugart disk of 1976 and the 3.5-inch Sony disk of 1982 that became the universal 1.44 MB diskette of the PC and Mac era. It shipped in every computer for two decades, was dropped from the iMac in 1998 and from mainstream PCs in the early 2000s, and Sony, the last major manufacturer, ended sales in March 2011.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 1971
  2. 1971 Launch
    IBM ships the 8-inch floppy

    80 KB, read-only, for loading mainframe microcode.

  3. 1976
  4. 1976 Version
    The 5.25-inch minifloppy

    Shugart Associates; adopted by the Apple II and IBM PC.

  5. 1982
  6. 1982 Version
    Sony introduces the 3.5-inch disk

    Rigid shell and metal shutter; the Macintosh adopts it in 1984.

  7. 1987
  8. 1987 Version
    1.44 MB high density

    The disk everyone means by "floppy".

  9. 1998
  10. 15 August 1998 Decline
    The iMac ships without a floppy drive

    Apple is mocked; everyone follows within five years.

  11. 2003
  12. February 2003 Decline
    Dell drops the drive as standard

    "R.I.P. Floppy Disk", says the BBC.

  13. 2010
  14. 23 April 2010 Shutdown announced
    Sony to end floppy sales

    The last major maker gives a March 2011 date.

  15. 2011
  16. March 2011 Shutdown
    Sony stops selling floppies in Japan

    The end of mass production.

  17. 2024
  18. 3 July 2024 other
    Japan removes the floppy from government procedures

    The digital minister declares his war on the floppy won.

Ownership [edit]

IBM 1971–2011 Founded Invented the 8-inch disk; the 5.25-inch came from Shugart Associates and the 3.5-inch from Sony, which was the last major maker

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Sony, which by 2010 sold about 70% of the 3.5-inch floppies still being made, announced on 23 April 2010 that it would stop selling them in Japan in March 2011, having already left most other markets. The disk had been dying for a decade: Apple dropped the drive with the iMac in August 1998, Dell stopped fitting it as standard in 2003, and by then a floppy held less than one photo from a phone. USB sticks, CD-R and the network took over.

Our analysis: The floppy disk lasted longer than any storage medium of the personal computer era because everything read it and it was cheap. It died when its capacity, 1.44 MB, stopped being a rounding error and started being a joke, and when the drive was the only moving part left in a PC that anyone wanted to remove. It has the strangest afterlife of any dead technology: it is the save icon in a billion pieces of software, it was still updating Boeing 747 software in 2020, and Japan only finished removing it from government forms in 2024.

History [edit]

Three sizes

IBM built the first floppy disk, an 8-inch, 80 KB read-only disk in a fabric-lined sleeve, to load microcode into System/370 mainframes; it shipped in 1971 and the team, led by David Noble under Alan Shugart, added a read-write version in 1973. Shugart left IBM, and his Shugart Associates introduced the 5.25-inch minifloppy in 1976 for the microcomputers then appearing; it went into the Apple II and the IBM PC and by the early 1980s held 360 KB, later 1.2 MB. Sony introduced the 3.5-inch disk in a rigid plastic shell with a sliding metal shutter in 1982; the Macintosh adopted it in 1984, IBM in 1986, and the 1.44 MB high-density version of 1987 became the disk everyone means by "floppy".

For twenty years it was how software was sold, how work went home and how files moved between machines. Windows 95 came on 13 disks. The Zip drive, LS-120 and others tried to replace it with a bigger disk and could not dislodge it, because a floppy drive was in every computer and cost almost nothing.

Removed, then unmade

Apple shipped the iMac in August 1998 without a floppy drive and was mocked for it for about a year. Dell stopped fitting drives as standard in early 2003, the BBC ran the headline "R.I.P. Floppy Disk", and PC World, the UK retailer, stopped selling the disks in 2007. USB flash drives, writable CDs and email had taken every job the floppy had.

Manufacturing outlasted demand. On 23 April 2010 Sony, which still made most of the world's 3.5-inch disks and had sold 12 million of them in Japan in 2009, said it would end sales in March 2011. That was the last major line. Since then the remaining stock has been traded by a handful of dealers, most famously floppydisk.com in California, whose owner told The Register in 2022 he had about four years of supply left, and the disks kept turning up in odd places: Boeing 747 navigation databases updated by floppy in 2020, US nuclear command systems until 2019, and Japanese government procedures until July 2024, when the digital minister declared victory in his war on the floppy.

The domain today

There is no domain; the disk lives on as the save icon.

Similar projects

HD DVD Toshiba's high-definition disc, first to market and dead within two years 2006–2008 MiniDisc Sony's recordable disc for the Walkman age, outlived by the iPod and its own fans 1992–2025 Iomega Zip drive 100 megabytes on a fat floppy, and the Click of Death 1995–2003 AOL Dial-Up The modem noise stopped, AOL did not 1991–2025 Adobe Flash The plugin that animated the web 1996–2020 Internet Explorer The browser that won the war and lost the peace 1995–2022

Sources [edit]

  1. R.I.P. Floppy Disk BBC News 1 April 2003 [archived]
  2. Sony announces the death of the floppy disk Wired 26 April 2010 [archived]
  3. Boeing 747s still get critical updates via floppy disks The Verge 11 August 2020 [archived]
  4. Last floppy disk business has about four years of life left The Register 20 September 2022 [archived]
  5. Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks Reuters 3 July 2024 [archived]
  6. The evolution of the floppy disk for PCs The New York Times 14 March 1990 [archived]

Last verified: 16 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).