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'The sound of a computer's floppy disk drive will be as closely associated with 20th century computing as the sound of a computer dialling in to the Internet,' said Bryan Magrath, commercial director of PC World.

Introduced in 1971 by IBM, the first floppy - an eight-inch plastic disk - was invented by Alan Shugart and held just 100KB of data. The first three-and-a-half inch floppy drives and disks were released by Sony in 1981.

But growing storage needs have pushed USB sticks and memory cards to the forefront of portable storage. The floppy disk, with its 1.44 megabytes of data, pales in comparison to the gigabytes on offer with modern portable storage.

'The pace of technological change is relentless and it is now increasingly standard for computer users to transfer data via the internet or use USB memory sticks, some of which will store the equivalent of 1,000 times the capacity of floppy disk,' Magrath said. 'With that amount of memory available in such a small and convenient device, the floppy disk looks increasingly quaint and simply isn't able to compete.'

Now, only two per cent of PCs and laptops sold by the retailer have in-built floppy disk drives. By summer, PC World expects that none of its computers will feature an 'A: drive'.

PC World's parent company, DSG International, previously made news for pulling video recorders and analogue cameras from their stores' shelves.