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Good-bye my slightly oxymoronic friend

11 September, 2007 (11:12) | Technology | By: Ben

That would be the floppy disk. The last widely used version was a 3.5 inch disk in a hard shell. Inside it may have been floppy but anybody could quickly figure out that actually folding this disk would lead to its immediate destruction.

Flash drives and other media formats have done in the floppy disk. With emphasis now towards digital media content, typically the floppy disk can’t hold a single song under medium to high quality encoding. 

Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and MS-DOS 6.22 was distributed on less than a dozen 3.5 inch floppy disks. The Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems would have only taken around 450 floppy disks if distributed that way.  Windows Vista, if distributed on floppy disks would take over 2000.

Even the smallest flash drives you can find for free hold 50 times the space these disks can hold. A common flash drive size is now 4GB which is approximately 2500 times the size of a 1.44MB floppy disk.

So what do you do with all your old floppy disks?