The Floppy Disk

“One diskette could hold the capacity of about 3000 tabulating cards. There was just no comparison and the world has many millions of trees still in forests that were not cut down because the floppy drive came along and made it possible to do all of this much more efficiently than cutting down all those trees and making all those tab cards.”

“You know I thought that would be a better way to do it than with punch cards but it never occurred to me that it would explode the way it did, so I was taken by surprise by this.”

“…although magnetic tape could certainly do the job, the capability of random access storage prompted the development of the floppy disk, an economical program load device that not only loaded the control program, but also diagnostics as required. And control programs were easy to change just by slipping in a new floppy disk. It was but a short step for the desirability of logging on the same device to result in the addition of a write capability. Lo and behold, a small, inexpensive random access storage device that would provide for an absolute market explosion for small systems.”

“The Floppy Disk is a most unusual success story. Initially we hid them inside our main frames and control units, and I supposed they attracted less than the expected attention for that reason. Then we introduced the Floppy as an ideal medium for key recording of data, and I think it acquired a higher profile. But when the industry spotted it as a truly ‘flexible’ small peripheral storage device it really attracted attention. So it seems, Dave that you have an unusual degree of assurance of being remembered by your old friends. I believe that the small-computer journals which I read regularly carry more ads for, and articles on, floppies than almost any other product.”

“But many of today's worthy reminiscences… leave one issue unaddressed. That would be the floppy's most lasting inheritance, the "save" and "save as" disk icons you see in the toolbars and menus of many applications. Even when software developers rewrite interfaces from scratch, they keep going back to the same old floppy-disk icon—see, for example, the icons featured in Microsoft Word 2007. What do we do about that? Should we agree on a replacement graphic of some sort? Or should we regard these icons as the visual equivalent of such spoken anachronisms as saying we'll "dial" a phone number?”

“Although these disks have already drifted into the realm of hipster-fueled, retro-ironic nostalgia (see also: SNES cartridges), we have a lingering love for the floppy. It’s a symbol of a simpler time—a time before cloud storage and Google Docs made it impossible to wedge a corrupted disk under your professor’s door at 5 a.m. only to claim that the paper had been on the disk the night before, a time when it took nine disks or so to get an OS onto your hard drive, a time when 1.4 MB actually meant something.”

“The diskette never worked well enough without the jacket, and I don’t think the floppy would be here today without that invention.”

“IBM always referred to it as diskette and diskette drive. I don’t think you’ll ever find an IBM publication that mentions floppy. ... But our customers always did.”