With Sony ending production of the 3.5″ floppy disk next year, I wanted to put together this retrospective. Of specific note is that the iMac debuted commercially before the USB thumb drive did, so the release of the USB drive could be indirectly attributed to Apples design decisions; kind of neat. So without further ado:

1972- IBM makes commercially available the 8″ floppy they had invented the year before. The floppy becomes popular for the first time as a storage device.

1976-The 5.25″ floppy disk was invented by Shugart Associates as a replacement for the 8″ floppy. The format was so successful, that the 8″ quickly disappeared, with over 10 manufacturers producing floppy drives by 1978, and the 5.25″ floppy became a common fixture in personal computers and workstations around the world.

1984-Public Software Library (PsL) begins mail order distribution of shareware and freeware on floppy disk. Nelson Ford started the company when readers of his column, Public Software Library, wrote in asking for samples of many of the applications he discussed in his column. The shareware phenomenon was in full swing by the late 80′s over bulletin boards and catalog disk sales, solidifying a business model where computer users could try software before buying the full version.

1986-The 3.5″ HD was released containing a whopping 1.44 MB of memory. Though roughly having the same amount of storage space as its 5.25″ cousin, the format became an instant hit because of it’s smaller size and no doubt its similarity to the data disks used on Star Trek. The disks hard plastic housing and sliding metal guard also afforded the media more physical protection than previous disk formats, making them a favorite toss around media for college and high students in the late 80′s through the beginning of the 2000′s.

1987-The save to disk option on an Apple Macintosh computer is introduced to look like a floppy disk with the shutter on backwards.

1988-Superdisk debuts for the Apple Macintosh. The drive was touted as being able to read most of the common formats of floppy disks at the time, this included disks formatted with the Microsoft DOS operating system. The Superdisk as well as the Macintosh proved popular with schools for their versatility and ease of use.

Late 80′s, Early 90′s-Computer City starts giving away free floppy disks with every purchase.

1994-IOMEGA debuts their Zip drive, which is just a big floppy drive in disguise. Though it never caught on like it’s 3.5″ counterpart, the original 100 MB version had a short lived popularity throughout the late 90′s and into the 2000′s, eventually being replaced by USB flash drives and alternative storage products such as CDs and DVDs. The Zip drive proved especially popular for use by college students and graphics professionals, who preferred the greater storage space and the Zip drives reputation for reliability.

1997-SuperDisk is debuted by 3M as a Zip drive killer. The format itself was supposed to combine the best qualities of a floptical drive (like a Zip drive) and a 3.5″ floppy drive just as the Superdrive had done nine years earlier, allowing both formats to be used with the device. Though the device looked good on paper, in practice it never lived up to the hype, and was quietly discontinued by 2006.

1998-iMac debuts, becoming the first commercially successful computer to completely remove the floppy drive from the personal computer.

2000-IBM and Trek Technology are the first companies to commercially market the USB drive to consumers. The USB drive, also popularly called the jumb drive, flash drive, or thumb drive, eventually replaces floppy drives as the removable storage media of choice.

April 2010-Sony, the last major manufacturer of floppy disks, announces they will halt production of new disks by March 2011.

Well, it finally happened, after several years of trying, Adobe finally gave up on Flash for the iPhone, and has announced that they will be turning their undivided attention to supporting Android and other third party operating systems instead.

This, announced yesterday, just hours after Apple issued a statement that it would no longer be supporting the use of compilers in the creation of applications for their products, as dictated by their application developer license.

Adobe, for its part, was to announce the updated release of its, Packager software, a compiler that Adobe had been using in lieu of Apples native support of the Flash format to port its applications to iPhone and iPad devices.

Apples reason for issuing the license update, as stated by Steve Jobs, was that Adobes software was buggy and wasn’t able to meet Apples exacting standards for the format.

Of course that makes the assumption that Apple wouldn’t have needed to rewrite the developer license if the software had worked correctly, which presumes that people would have actually bought the applications created with the software if they hadn’t worked all that well in the first place. Which as we all know by now, Apple quality controls, so there really wouldn’t be much of a chance for people to even see the software if Apple decided not to let it see the light of day.

All in all, yesterday was a great day to be in public relations.

A lot of times I like to use videos to express and illustrate many of the points and ideas that our site talks about on a regular basis. Culture in general is such a broad topic, it’s fun to see other peoples perspectives on the subject.

The definition of what is culture? is important, because culture is such a subjective topic, and it’s important to have a framework from which to talk about the subject. A lot of what we cover on this site deals with emerging trends and ideas about the evolution of our culture, and much of that, in today’s society, has to do with digital media and it’s application in our everyday lives.

Of particular note in this video is that it was created using public domain footage, and offers a good look at defining what digital culture is, as well as, if a little abstractly, how it has evolved.

I keep thinking about Microsoft’s search engine Bing, and wondering how it’s been stacking up in the last year or so. It debuted last year in June, and thus far its progress has been anything but extraordinary since it’s only maintaining a 3% adoption rate among search engine users. Still, the operating system has a neat gimmick with it’s advertising, Bing, the decision engine.

The advertising is interesting, since it sheds light on one of those issues that most people take for granted, when is too much information, too much of a good thing?

The idea behind Google was a relatively simple one, make searches simple to use, make them fast, and allow people to search the entire internet if they need to in order to find exactly what they are looking for. The idea for Bing is a little different, a little more streamlined; searching should be focused on on large sites with the broadest possible amount of information available to be gleaned from the site. The user then can focus their category to get better results. Think of Bing as more of cheat card, where as Google is more of an encyclopedia.

When you think about the differences, you’ll probably say, well who cares, but when you realize, that a lot of the sites we look up over and over again are within a certain range of popular online destinations such as Mapquest, Expedia, flowers, Amazon, Buy.com, fantasy football; a site that can provide quickest destination to what could be argued the best of all possible sites could be just what the doctor ordered for a number of people.

That said, Bing hasn’t jumped ahead of anyone at this point, and it’s not likely that they will anytime soon, but it’s an interesting topic to keep ones eye on, especially as people begin to demand more from their wireless devices, laptops, and cell phones. With Google and Apple owning nearly all of the current mobile device operating system market, Microsoft is just barely able to keep pace in what is possibly one of the most important emerging consumer markets of this century. A specialty market where speed and simplicity could be big assets in a search engine with the clout to actually take advantage of it.

That said, Microsoft really needs for Bing to work, and they really need it to work with the rest of their product line up if they want to really capture peoples attention.

People have to need to adopt a new way of thinking with this technology, not just redress an old one, and the company that delivers that will be the company, or companies, that really defines our relationship with this technology and makes it an experience both unique and exemplifies how we best want to live our lives.

But if nothing else, at least the commercials are fun to watch.

Political commentary has always been a big part of our culture and a significant mainstay on the world wide web. On the whole, this has been the case because the medium is so good at conveying information without the threat of censorship or retribution. That said, of recent note is the Apple App Stores rejection of the NewsToons App, an iPhone application that delivers satirical cartoons as seen on the website, www.markfiore.com, as well as links to the news articles that served as their inspiration. Mark Fiore, himself, became the first exclusively Web-based cartoonist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in the last few weeks, and this honor, coupled with public outcry over the incident, led Apple to rethink their position on the rejection, and as of the publishing of this article, the NewsToons App ($0.99) is available at the Apple App Store for download.

The incident in question brings up an interesting point on censorship that has been floating around the web these days with Google’s issues with censorship in China and the FCC vs Comcast ruling over companies rights to police their own content: where does one draw the line on censorship? Apple being a public enterprise, with its own rules and decisions about policy enforcement, obviously has the right to draw its line just about anywhere it desires, yet it’s relevant to point out that this isn’t always in their best interest, or in ours.

As restated from PCWorld.com, the United States, not to mention most other democratic nations, has a long tradition of lampooning its public figures and political leaders with satirical writing, drawings and radio and television shows.

Apples initial judgment against the NewsToons app was the idea that the material depicted in the application was offensive to many of it’s customers, so was not fit to be included in its online store, yet these are the same ideas that newspapers and opinion columns run every day of the year, and if we were to censor these, there would surely be public scrutiny, so then what exactly is the problem?

Apple’s censorship of what is essentially a long historied tradition is, in essence, a really big deal. It undermines the fabric of a society that has based itself around a culture of open consumables and free speech, and while people will argue monumentally about how certain ideas and thoughts, openly expressed in a manner that is respectful and heartfelt, will tear our country apart, or in the case of a corporation such as Apple, drive business away, I’ve often found that this isn’t the case at all, and that many of these naysayers, were prone to overreaction.

The issue with a relatively new medium such as the internet, iApps, and digital content in general is that so many of the battlefields have yet to be drawn with any clarity, and the government has less control over internet content and services than practically any other institution in use by the United States consumer.

The internet is not a business in and of itself, yet a small portion of corporate America controls the majority of internet resources, putting these companies in the interesting position of policing public policies and sentiments directly without outside controls. And while, to this point, very little has been done to obstruct the free expression of services and speech using corporate methods, the idea that something could and eventually will happen is the mainstay argument of the case between the FCC and Comcast, with the government supporting net neutrality and Comcast seeking to continuing enforcing its own version of policy.

Ultimately these corporations walk a fine line with regards to policy decisions in this age of digital electronics. And it’s easy to see that we are a long way from meeting the needs of the many, as opposed to the few in this regard. Yet we as a culture are continuing to expand, and policies will need to find a way to meet these burgeoning needs half way if companies and consumers wish to safely co-exist.