Dead Media Bouquet

Where do formats go to die?

In 1995 the science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling proposed the Dead Media Project, a catalogue of communication technologies that had died. The web was new, CD-ROMs were going to change everything, and he wanted a longer view, so he went looking for the bodies. He offered a crisp fifty-dollar bill to whoever wrote The Dead Media Handbook. Nobody ever wrote it, so the fifty stayed crisp. The field notes kept arriving anyway, about 600 of them, and were later collected as a free ebook of more than 900 pages, which is a lot of obituaries for an industry that insists it only ever moves forward.

The floppy disk took longer to die than you’d think, like a houseguest who hears the taxi being called and puts the kettle on. Apple left the drive out of the iMac in 1998 and Dell followed in 2003, but Sony, one of the last makers, only stopped selling floppy disks in Japan in March 2011. Its sales there had fallen from 47 million in 2000 to 8.5 million in 2009. Eight and a half million of them, in 2009, more than a decade after Apple had moved on.

Everything in this bouquet still works, in principle, which is roughly what every vendor says about everything right up until the support page vanishes. All you need is a machine that takes the disk, a cable that fits the machine, a driver that talks to the cable and an operating system that still remembers what a driver was for. Finding those is your problem. The companies that sold you the format moved on years ago and left you holding the flowers.

Evidence: Dead Media Project, Wikipedia, Sony to halt floppy disk sales in 2011, Computerworld