I just read that as of March 2011, Sony will stop manufacturing floppy disks. As they are the only company left making them, this will mean a world without the clicking and whirring of those little plastics disks. I won’t miss the days of installing programs and searching for disk six of ten. For those of you who don’t remember them or who are feeling a bit of nostalgia, go check out Mashable’s retrospective on Flickr.

So we’ve now seen the death of the vinyl record, 8-track, cassette tape, Polaroid Film (and likely film in general for mass market use), and the floppy disk. Likely next (at least as far as PCs go) is the Compact Disc. With more and more information entering the cloud, are we nearing the end of holding our own permanent physical storage? I guess the advocates of client-server computing are being somewhat vindicated.

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