Sony announces the official end of the disk
After about thirty-nine years of loyal service, the disk will soon be made: Sony, the ultimate manufacturer of storage media history, throws in the towel. The latest model in force, the 3.5-inch disappear permanently from its production lines in Japan in March 2011. The few European and American channels, Sony has closed a few days ago.
Undermined by the second half of the 90s by the local network and the blank CDs, use the floppy disk has mainly been dethroned in the early 2000s by the USB key, less fragile, faster and offer more memory capacity.
The disk has been for over twenty-five years the majority of backup media workstations. The PC running Windows XP still claim the case to install the driver for a hard disk controller. And most software professionals, Microsoft Office head, always use an icon to his effigy to symbolize the registration process the current file.
IBM, the precursor
Manufacturers such as Imation, Memorex, Freecom or König still offer the sale of 3.5-inch floppy drives connecting via USB. For recovery on a modern computer content previously stored on these media, however, these drives are compatible with DOS-formatted floppy disks and a capacity of only 1.44 MB Exit thus restoring old Mac files or documents that were recorded on IBM PS / 2, which boasted of such removable media format 2.88 MB
For this is indeed the tragedy of disks: the multiplication of all extreme standards more compatible with each other. Launched in 1971 by IBM to provide its mainframe system backup backup faster than cartridges, the disk is then a magnetic disk enclosed in a pocket square box of 8 inches (20 cm) square. Too big for the desktop, then dedicated only to word processing, the disk passes in 1976 the format of a restaurant napkin, 5.25 inches (about 13 cm in diameter). And he will have to wait five years for providers admit that the cover cardboard does not even data about dust or folds. Of course, no drive to the new 3.5-inch offers backward compatibility with previous generation disks.
Victim of anarchy of its formats
Changes in physical appearance is not the greatest obstacle to sustaining drives. The anarchy of formatting possibilities, namely the different ways of recording information on the magnetic surface, many condemned restore data. With an initial capacity of 180 KB, the 360 KB floppy goes with readers on both sides. But they are unable to read the disks that returned by hand to write on both sides. Then, still climbing capacity is doubled, it quadruples the number of tracks. Without backward compatibility. For IBM, it also increases the number of sectors. At Apple, it is rather vary the speed of rotation. Nothing is compatible with nothing. Even Microsoft betray format 1.44 MB DOS/FAT12 he had imposed on the software industry, to distribute their own applications with capacities of 1.68 MB
In the late 90s, is the physical format, this time, which can no longer evolve as standard. Matsushita intends to move to an LS with triangular notches 120MB Sony argues instead for the model with rectangular grooves HiFD 150 MB The Caleb UHD, which looks very much like the conventional 3.5-inch disk, but contains 144 MB And Iomega is experiencing a critical success with its Zip 100MB look more massive than others.
