We've dealt a little with storage media so far, mainly audio storage on cassette tapes and visual storage of information on microfilm (and storing contact information on paper in your Rolodex). This week's topic, floppy disks, speaks to a method for portable computer information storage. Now, there was a time in the 1950s through the early 1970s when you didn't really need to have a portable method of storage for what you were working on using a computer. This was because you were running programs and storing files on a mainframe computer. You might only work on one of these at a time, you didn't have one at home, and for the most part they were not connected together with a network. You could possibly walk around with a big reel of magnetic tape, which was used to back up files on a mainframe, but that wouldn't be very convenient (you wouldn't have a way of accessing the information on the tape).
But, with the creation of the personal computer, there was a need to have a way to store files and other data in a way that was more mobile. You might need to work on files at multiple different computers, or, especially in the early days before computers were networked together, you might just need to move files between computers in the same room.
The floppy disk came to the rescue as a relatively inexpensive way of carrying your files with you. It was (as shown in the image above on the left) a squarish, 5-1/4 inch piece of plastic that does indeed bend and "flop" as you wave it up and down. You would insert the floppy into a floppy disk drive either as an external unit you plugged into your computer, or as an internal drive that would have a slot for entering disks right on your computer.
Developed at various larger sizes in the early 1970s, by the 1980s and into the early 1990s the 5-1/4 inch floppy was very common, usually holding just 360K of memory. That is not a lot of space, but it was sufficient for the level of memory that many files of the time required. Over time, though, as files and programs grew in size, and started to require multiple floppy disks, larger capacity media. Two examples of that are in the image above - in the center is a 3.5" disk (still called a "floppy", though it was not) that could hold 1.44MB, and a Zip disk (this one held 250MB). They both required separate drives.
I remember having a floppy disk when I was in the Computer Club in high school (mid 1980s), and then several in college. They didn't do well in extreme temperatures, and while I only remember ruining a couple of them, leaving them in a hot car or walking around in the winter were always sources of fear about losing files.
Portable storage kept evolving, most notably over the last 20 years with USB flash drives that could regularly store multiple GB of data, up to two terabytes. For the most part, we have seen portable storage devices become eclipsed by storing stuff in the cloud, in our ubiquitous online file storage locations like Google Drive. And, I'm skipping over CD-ROMs, which we'll likely cover soon.
If you'd like to see (and shake) a floppy disk (or any other ancient storage media), stop by the library. More throwback technology is coming at you next week!
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