Floppy disks obsolete, headed for the recycle bin

You can officially move your old computer floppy disks to your obsolete file, since Sony has announced plans to discontinue selling them in Japan in March 2011, according to The Consumerist. The early file storage devices have been supplanted by flash drives, DVDs, portable hard drives and cloud storage.

The first commonly used floppies from back in the late 1970s, the 5 1/4" double-density, held 360 kilobytes of information. A modern 4-gigabyte card the size of your little-toe nail has the capacity of 11,650 of these old floppies.

The more recent 3 1/2" floppies, introduced around 1983, held 1 megabyte of data, equal to three floppies. Even these were vast improvements over loading a computer from a cassette player, which I did with my first Texas Instruments personal computer.