http://www.examiner.com/x-16352-Jap...y-to-discontinue-35-inch-floppy-disk-in-Japan
This is the definite end of another great era in the history of computers. Well, that is not entirely true, as for most of us that era ended long ago. I personally fully switched to optical media in 2001 or so, when I got my first CD burner, and as of 2006 I barely even use those and instead favor USB drives and file hosting services. I think 2002 or 2003 may have been the last time I used a floppy disk. I do still know some people who still use floppies occasionally - for example, my Mum, who is an accountant and finds floppies more convenient for submitting accounting data to government services like the revenue service or the statistical office.
But still, heyday of the 3.5" floppy disk was in the early-to-mid '90s. So many fond gaming memories from that era are inextricably tied to the floppy. Like those disks that used to come with gaming publications, filled to the brim with neat shareware games like this one. Or when games started growing in size and spanning multiple disks (I still remember that TES: Arena shipped on jaw-dropping nine disks). That triumphant feeling when we figured out how to use pkzip to create multi-part, fixed-size archives, which enabled us to share this amazing new shoot 'em up everyone was talking about... I think it was called Doom or something...
Then there was the rise of CD-rips - i.e. versions of CD-based games with multimedia content like music and video ripped out, with the purpose of making them small enough to distribute on floppy disks or pirate CD compilations. I still have a few of those collecting dust in my closet, containing brilliant gems like Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Warcraft II, C&C, GTA (the original!) and loads of others. Usually I or one of my friends would buy a compilation and then share individual games with everybody else on - you guessed it - floppy disks. But for some games even their rips were pretty big - for example, Need For Speed: SE spanned about 50 floppies even with all music removed. As anyone who has used floppies will remember, when you have that many floppies, chances are at least one of them will contain a bad sector or two. Back in 1996, a friend of mine desperately wanted NFS:SE, but he had a 486 laptop without an optical drive, so it took us a couple of tries before we managed to get 50 demonstrably functional disks together and finally copy the game to his system. But then more and more games started appearing which were too huge for floppies even with music and video ripped out - again Bethesda broke new grounds with Daggerfall, which took up a whole CD, and almost all of it was game data.
Man, things sure have changed since then. Gone are the days when we trotted merrily to school or to our friends' places while carrying plastic bags full of floppy disks. There was a certain passion in gaming back then, but it's gone now. Nowadays you share games by sending people torrent or RapidShare links. It's all so cold and impersonal, and I can't even recall the last time I had a gaming-and-pizza session with my buddies. Come to think of it, barely any of my real-life buddies are still gamers after all these years. It isn't just gaming that has grown up, but us gamers have as well, it seems.
This is the definite end of another great era in the history of computers. Well, that is not entirely true, as for most of us that era ended long ago. I personally fully switched to optical media in 2001 or so, when I got my first CD burner, and as of 2006 I barely even use those and instead favor USB drives and file hosting services. I think 2002 or 2003 may have been the last time I used a floppy disk. I do still know some people who still use floppies occasionally - for example, my Mum, who is an accountant and finds floppies more convenient for submitting accounting data to government services like the revenue service or the statistical office.
But still, heyday of the 3.5" floppy disk was in the early-to-mid '90s. So many fond gaming memories from that era are inextricably tied to the floppy. Like those disks that used to come with gaming publications, filled to the brim with neat shareware games like this one. Or when games started growing in size and spanning multiple disks (I still remember that TES: Arena shipped on jaw-dropping nine disks). That triumphant feeling when we figured out how to use pkzip to create multi-part, fixed-size archives, which enabled us to share this amazing new shoot 'em up everyone was talking about... I think it was called Doom or something...
Then there was the rise of CD-rips - i.e. versions of CD-based games with multimedia content like music and video ripped out, with the purpose of making them small enough to distribute on floppy disks or pirate CD compilations. I still have a few of those collecting dust in my closet, containing brilliant gems like Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Warcraft II, C&C, GTA (the original!) and loads of others. Usually I or one of my friends would buy a compilation and then share individual games with everybody else on - you guessed it - floppy disks. But for some games even their rips were pretty big - for example, Need For Speed: SE spanned about 50 floppies even with all music removed. As anyone who has used floppies will remember, when you have that many floppies, chances are at least one of them will contain a bad sector or two. Back in 1996, a friend of mine desperately wanted NFS:SE, but he had a 486 laptop without an optical drive, so it took us a couple of tries before we managed to get 50 demonstrably functional disks together and finally copy the game to his system. But then more and more games started appearing which were too huge for floppies even with music and video ripped out - again Bethesda broke new grounds with Daggerfall, which took up a whole CD, and almost all of it was game data.
Man, things sure have changed since then. Gone are the days when we trotted merrily to school or to our friends' places while carrying plastic bags full of floppy disks. There was a certain passion in gaming back then, but it's gone now. Nowadays you share games by sending people torrent or RapidShare links. It's all so cold and impersonal, and I can't even recall the last time I had a gaming-and-pizza session with my buddies. Come to think of it, barely any of my real-life buddies are still gamers after all these years. It isn't just gaming that has grown up, but us gamers have as well, it seems.
If it weren't for the bootup disk.
Damn new computers. The impatient bastard did a clean format instead of waiting to get a new way to boot and erase the folder. 
