 I'm Tom Merritt from Daily Tech News Show. Here are the top five failed attempts to replace the floppy drive. You just couldn't replace it. Well, eventually it did, but not by these. Remember the floppy disk? Before it was just the save icon, we actually used them to boot up our computers, run software, and store our data. Near the end of the format's life, several companies hoped they could create a successor. Turns out the successor is the cloud, but we feel compelled to commemorate their cloud-free efforts. So here are the top five sadly failed floppy disk replacements. Number five, Caleb UHD-144. It's all right there in the name. Floppy disk getting too small? Make a bigger one. Introduced in 1998, the Caleb UHD-144 was a 144 megabyte floppy disk system that could also read, write, and format the old three and a half inch floppy disks. UHD-144 disks were $5 a pop, though, in 1998 dollars. Caleb technology went bankrupt in 2002. Coming in at number four, Sony High FD. High FD, Sony was the creator of the three and a half inch floppy disk. So it thought, well, we could totally create a successor. Let's team up with Fujifilm on the high capacity floppy disk or high FD in 1998. Again, it's the just make it bigger approach. It was backwards compatible with existing floppy disks, and the disk could store 150 megabytes. Then a new version in November 1999 increased that to 200 megabytes. But it also came with poor reliability and was pretty expensive. So they discontinued that one in 2001. At number three, Super Disk LS120. Another high capacity alternative. This one came along in 1997. It was also backwards compatible. And it increased capacity not as high to 120 megabytes, though they eventually raised that to 240 megabytes. It held on a little longer than some of the others. But stiff competition from iOmega and compatibility issues with older Macs led to its discontinuation in the early 2000s. Sliding in at number two, the Zip Drive. This high performance system from iOmega came out in 1995. It was around for a while. It was not backwards compatible with three and a half inch disks, but it came in 100 megabyte, 250 megabyte and 750 megabyte models. Now, the drive was popular throughout the 90s, but the company faced a class action lawsuit over the notorious click of death failure mode of the drives. At number one, possibly we made it number one because of the name, Floptical. An early contender introduced in 1991, the Floptical was developed by Insight Peripherals. By the way, that spelled I-N-S-I-T-E. It used an infrared LED sensor to guide the read, right head to the correct location on the Floptical disks, letting it hold up to 21 megabytes of data. The drive also had a second set of read, right heads that could handle traditional three and a half inch disks. Insight licensed the technology to Matsushita, iOmega, Max-L, Hitachi, but still they only sold 70,000 units worldwide. Floppies resisted every one of these challenges until the mid-2000s, when they faced a combo breaker from USB sticks, low-cost, rewriteable CDRs and internet storage. Will something replace the cloud someday? Tune in and find out. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash daily tech news show, get the podcast at DailyTechNewsShow.com and for secret special content support us at Patreon.com slash DTNS. I'll see you there.