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There are still two usable computers with 3.5 inch floppy disk drives in my basement office. I was sorry to note that I don’t have any 5-1/4 inch drives.
My most recent use of the floppy drive was to read a few diskettes from a friend’s business and transfer the files to USB flash.
CD drives are still useful for any audiobooks I borrow from the library, so that gets steady use.
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I have a late ’90s-era Yamaha EX5 synthesizer with a built-in floppy drive for loading and exporting presets. It’s a great keyboard and a great synth, and hey – as long as long as it keeps working, I’m happy!
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I still have a working Mavica floppy based camera, box of floppies I am holding on to, and still a working zip drive. More than once I have had someone say, hey, can you extract this old data? I have a super floppy drive someplace too.
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I’ve seen them all, from paper tape, mag tape, and punch cards in the 70’s to dinner plate size floppies in the 80’s. Then 5.25’s, 3.5’s, 10mb hard drive cards, flash drives, and on and on and on. Now I’m retired and use a fountain pen and post-it notes.
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And one’s very end is denoted with letters chiseled into marble.
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Back in the 1980s sometime (don’t ask me exactly when) I was assigned to work on a NEW micro computer that would read and write floppy disks. I won’t mention the name, because, when we got the second model, we found that disks written on the first machine could not be read by the second machine, and vice versa. And so the project died. In my next job, I learned that my boss had written a database application on two disks. One 1k disk had the program, and the other 1K disk had the database! You loaded one, then worked on the other. It was in Fortran. Part of my job was debugging it when things occasionally went wrong. Do people still talk about bloatware these days?
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this was THE album when it dropped.
still is, really.
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… in these days of folks keeping entire seasons of TV shows on their phones to watch offline, there doesn’t seem to be much risk that application software is ever going to be a big storage hit again
but that doesn’t stop people arguing about it
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Back when the 3.5" variety was becoming popular, one of my colleagues bemoaned the fact that people still called them “floppies”. She said that “floppies” were called that because they were bendable - they weren’t rigid disks - and that the 3.5" ones should be called something else to indicate their non-bendableness.
She suggested calling them “stiffies”.
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Yep, still in my heavy rotation list. 
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of course the argument was always that the disk was still floppy. it was only the container which was… well… like you say
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General applications? Probably not. But games? We’re up to 150GB+ easily for a single game.
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i sometimes suspect this is a perverse form of copy protection. if it’s too big to store, it’s too big for warez
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That’s been used as one before. That was the protection for some of the first CD-ROM games.
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That image is 68 time the size of the whole game 
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Meanwhile, San Francisco is using floppies in critical infrastructure (public transit).
(I tried linking but it’s not allowed).
It’s not clear to me why they can’t have an emulator box.
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You mean this? SFMTA’s train system running on floppy disks; city fears ‘catastrophic failure’ before upgrade
What I can’t figure out is why they don’t pop over to the local Fry’s and get one of these:
Maybe the software uses floppy disks as part of a copy protection scheme?
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Because Fry’s has gone the way of, well, the floppy disk.
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