PC World, Britain"s largest chain of computer superstores, will not reorder any more floppy disks after the current 10,000 are sold. With 155 stores across Britain and nearly 50 more elsewhere in Europe, spokesman Hamish Thompson said the final stock of floppies will be gone "in weeks, if not days." "It"s had a good, long and productive life, but really, it"s just too small to hold any real data. It just doesn"t make sense any more," said Thompson.
The traditional 3.5-inch floppy disk has a storage capacity of 1.44 megabytes and has recently been rendered useless in favour of USB memory sticks and external hard drives. Floppy disks were the preferred storage device during the early home computing days of the 1980s and 1990s, but by the end of the century, software had moved to CDs. "The sound of a computer"s floppy disk drive will be as closely associated with 20th-century computing as the sound of a computer dialing in to the Internet," said Bryan McGrath, the company"s commercial director.