The slow death of the floppy

Well, the floppy disk may be finally coming to its full demise ... Sony are to stop making them as of March 2011. It has been a long slow death. Apple quit including them in their desktop computers way back in 1998. It took a further 5 years before Dell did the same with its PCs. However it has been another eight years before this halt in production. They are finally following the five and a quarter and eight inch floppies which preceded them.

In general, it seems as if the more innovative companies not only introduce more new ideas but are also pre-disposed to phase out older technologies sooner. As the speed of technology change speeds up, future technologies will die more quickly than older ones did.

In the case of long term storage technologies, it is worth people considering the safety and future accessibility of backed up or other potentially valuable data. Not all storage media is as long lasting as some mistakenly believe, and even if the data is still stored, one needs to ensure that the technology to read it is still available and compatible with new computing devices.