The floppy disk is dead (and Apple helped kill it)

The whole premise of this argument is ridiculous, because PCs which significantly outnumbered macs had BOTH for the longest time, ever after the IMac. The only thing Steve Jobs did by not including it was reduce his potential sales.

The floppy wasn't killed by Apple, it was killed by the fact that the content we were creating was just too large. However the floppy still remained useful, for booting etc.., there are even PCs today that still have them.

If this is the comparison that is being made, then flash has a very long life ahead of it, because flash is still useful. While the CD could replace the floppy, HTML5 on the other hand is not even fully functional yet.

I think this is overdone. In 1998, everyone knew the floppy was on the way out. ZIP drives were all the rage, as were re-writable CD-ROMs. As it turns out, the USB thumb drives (which weren't even on the radar) wound up being the true replacement. People were surprised that Apple didn't include a floppy, but it's important to remember that it was an option. Apple basically forced people to make the choice as to whether they really wanted a floppy. They didn't force people not to use floppies. In this case, Apple is saying that if you want to use an iPad or iPhone you can't use Flash.

I had a "funeral" for the floppy disk and some really weird things happened afterwards.

Luckily, I filmed the entire thing:

http://www.thecynch.com/video-funeral-for-a-floppy/

-Cynthia

IBM invented floppies, not Sony. From Wikipedia:

"Invented by the American information technology company IBM, floppy disks in 8-inch (203 mm), 5+1⁄4 in (133 mm), and 3+1⁄2 in (89 mm) formats enjoyed nearly three decades as a popular and ubiquitous form of data storage and exchange, from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s.

...

Sony introduced its own small-format 90.0 mm × 94.0 mm disk.; however, this format suffered from a fate similar to the other new formats: the 5¼-inch format simply had too much market share. A variant on the Sony design, introduced in 1982 by a large number of manufacturers, was then rapidly adopted. By 1988 the 3½-inch was outselling the 5¼-inch."

SD cards are already being used to distribute software for some devices.
GPS Maps come on write-protected SD Cards.
Some Nokia phones from 5 years ago distributed 3rd Party Software via MS Cards.

SD cards may be more expensive to produce than CDs but the price is dropping fast. Factor in lowered shipping costs and one day SD cards may make CDs obsolete.

Exactly .. help killing the BlueRay .. Steve Jobs is so visionary he actually kills formats before they even became standard.

T.

Yeah, taking out a storage technology that took 12 more years to scrap was not a stubborn decision but a look into the future. And Steve is now justified? Read only media in the first iMacs were so not a good solution (and Zip drives were quite expensive if someone wanted to move around just small Word docs and USB drives were science fiction). Floppies were clunky, slow, error prone, but for a quick move of files (or diagnostic start up) they were the cheapest and universally available solution around.

Sony didn't invent the floppy. IBM did... Al Shugart, who then created Shugart Associates, then Seagate Technologies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Shugart

I have never stored anything on any media, I don't need the cd rom, dvd or anything I just save my stuff to my desktop and its over. What the heck do you need all the junk lying around for, get rid of the dvd drive and make the machines faster.

I still have those Doom floppies!