Sonic territory…
Physical media provides a genuine – almost linear historical record. Which is mostly lost in the ‘delete and replace’ of modern storage formats, where the labelling nomenclature exists only as a digital file description.
Generations of computer users have carried, traded, sold and spilt drinks on these portable data wonders for well over 40 years!
A far from floppy history
As expedient as hard drives undoubtedly are, they don’t very well represent the choices of the person who made them, or the individual who catalogued them.
And therefore – in this writer’s opinion, the very beauty of them.
Introduced in 1967 by International Business Machines (IBM). The floppy disk replaced the tape storage format, eventually going on to have a mainstream life span that ran all the way up the early 2000s.
During its peak in the mid 1990s there were FIVE BILLION floppy disks sold per year
An 💾 for a legend
Whilst storage formats continue to evolve and servers become greener, the floppy disk will still retain a fond place in the hearts of many. The legend of them lives on in “save” icons of thousands of programs that are used every single day.
And in case you wondered- yes you can still buy them! And not just on re-sell sites like eBay or Amazon. Floppydisk.com sells 10 packs of disks and offers data transfer and recycling services too.
If you’d like to learn more about transferable data mediums then the early internet adopter Computer Hope is a great place to start!
Conserving history continues…
SampleNerd.com was founded to produce interesting, reliable and informative articles. From short articles such as this Conserving our history to Cornerstone content such as Allen Adkins – Pioneer.
Fair use: images included on site (where applicable) have been accrued over a period of time and from various online sources; particularly those from historical sales. Those that are included are for research, general interest, preservation and non-commercial purposes.
