Have you ever been playing a retro styled video game and, when you went to save the game, saw the saving icon and wondered, “Wait, what actually is that?” It is a floppy disk!
Floppy disks were invented in 1971 by IBM and were widely used throughout the 1980s to the early 2000s. At home, I have a computer that has a floppy drive from 2008, which is about when they started to fall out of fashion in favor of other storage formats. However, during their peak usage, floppy disks were used for everything with computers. They were used to hold everything from text, images, audio, and even entire operating systems (although, you often need several or a whole ton of them as they do not hold all that much data)! Floppy disks started out in an 8 inch size, and they were in fact quite floppy as they were made from thin plastic, which is where they got their name. The disk part of the name comes from the magnetic disk encased by the plastic, which is what holds the data on it. The technology slowly got better over time. The first floppy disks were only able to hold about 80kb of data, or 1/43rd of a music file! Eventually they got smaller and their storage abilities increased, leading to the most widely used and recognized format of the 3.5 inch, High Density, 1.44mb disk. This is the most common floppy disk that people know of and what is directly used as the save icon.
While floppy disks are quite old technology and do not hold much data, they are very neat to use. In a world where files are now transferred instantly and digitally over the internet at very high speeds, you lose the tactile feeling of having to put a disk into the computer. With the floppy disk, you put it in the computer and it gives a satisfying click, then you hear it spin up and load your data, and when you are done you hit the button and it ejects itself out for you to grab. It’s a very neat experience. If you are interested in computers and retro tech like I am, they are very cool to play around with. Just using them to put things on like little text files or photos and music, pretending it’s still the 80s. As well, they can often be found for extremely cheap or even free as nobody really uses them seriously anymore. We got a 10 pack of 3.5 inch High Density floppy disks at a thrift store for only six dollars! They are certainly cool to have to just hold and look at as well. If you ever see any, maybe take them home and see what you can do with them! I have learned that you can do a whole lot with what would be thought of as very little in technology.
