According to a recent report in the Mainichi Daily newspaper, Sony Friday announced the decision to end the sales of its 3.5-inch floppy disks in Japan in March next year; thereby implying that the days of the ancient storage medium are now officially numbered.

The announcement by Sony – holding 70 percent of the insipid 3.5-inch floppy disk’s market - is essentially a symbolic one; and sounds the formal death knell for the floppy disks’ format, with the company saying that it will discontinue the production of the disks in Japan.

Going by the Cnet statistics, though Sony discontinued the US production of floppy disks way back, it still managed to sell 12 million floppy disks in its last fiscal year; chiefly because it is the only big player in the now-antiquated market.

Sony introduced the 3.5-inch floppy disk storage medium to computers in 1981; and this format eventually replaced the 5.25-inch floppy disks. For almost three decades, the 3.5-inch floppies were a ubiquitous medium for storing and transferring files between personal computers.

However, the growing size of files and programs called for the need of inexpensive and larger-format storage medium.

As such, with the advent of storage methods like CDs, DVDs, Zip, and USB drives, Sony’s floppies started witnessing plunging sales – falling from a record 47 million disks in fiscal 2002 to merely 12 million in fiscal 2009.