A major computing milestone passed by not too long ago and no one noted it: the effective end of the floppy disk.
As computer devices go, the 1.44 MB, 3.5”, double-sided floppy was a veritable Methuselah. It came into widespread use in around 1990 (when IBM adopted it for its latest PCs; Apple much earlier had adopted a 720 KB, one-sided variety for the Macintosh), and it remained an industry standard for roughly 15 years.
Curiously, the 3.5” floppy kept the “floppy” nomenclature even though it encased its magnetic media in a hard plastic case. The old 5.25” disks used in the original IBM PCs actually were floppy.
In any case, the disks were all-in-all a pretty handy medium. A PC could be booted from one. It could hold a fairly large number of word processing documents and spreadsheets. Long before users set up home networks, file transfer via “sneaker net” – copying from one PC to floppy and then copying from the floppy to another PC – was a well-established practice.
Ultimately, of course, multimedia and escalating file sizes did the floppy in. CD drives and flash memory sticks with the capacity of scores of floppies now are the favored medium for physically transferring files. At some point – I would guess it was some time in the last two or three years – the number of computers sold without floppies exceeded the number sold with them, and that effectively marked the end of the floppy as a standard.
Aside from marking the end of an era, the end of the floppy also marks a particular computing problem: what to do with the data on your old floppies. Remember, once your last PC with a floppy drive is gone, those disks are effectively unreadable. So now is the time to take your floppies and burn them on a CD.
Which in itself is a lesson: One CD will take the place of about 485 floppies.
As computer devices go, the 1.44 MB, 3.5”, double-sided floppy was a veritable Methuselah. It came into widespread use in around 1990 (when IBM adopted it for its latest PCs; Apple much earlier had adopted a 720 KB, one-sided variety for the Macintosh), and it remained an industry standard for roughly 15 years.
Curiously, the 3.5” floppy kept the “floppy” nomenclature even though it encased its magnetic media in a hard plastic case. The old 5.25” disks used in the original IBM PCs actually were floppy.
In any case, the disks were all-in-all a pretty handy medium. A PC could be booted from one. It could hold a fairly large number of word processing documents and spreadsheets. Long before users set up home networks, file transfer via “sneaker net” – copying from one PC to floppy and then copying from the floppy to another PC – was a well-established practice.
Ultimately, of course, multimedia and escalating file sizes did the floppy in. CD drives and flash memory sticks with the capacity of scores of floppies now are the favored medium for physically transferring files. At some point – I would guess it was some time in the last two or three years – the number of computers sold without floppies exceeded the number sold with them, and that effectively marked the end of the floppy as a standard.
Aside from marking the end of an era, the end of the floppy also marks a particular computing problem: what to do with the data on your old floppies. Remember, once your last PC with a floppy drive is gone, those disks are effectively unreadable. So now is the time to take your floppies and burn them on a CD.
Which in itself is a lesson: One CD will take the place of about 485 floppies.
