The Floppy Disk

No, I don’t use the floppy disk anymore.  At least not in the way I used floppy disks before.  I’ve gone through different incarnations of floppy disks before and I could not imagine how “flimsy” the data was during those days.

First time I used a floppy disk, it was 8-inches and was for a TRS machine.  The funny thing about the TRS we had at school was that when there was a power interruption, you had to remove the diskette immediately.  This was not a problem, as you only had to press the cover and out popped the diskette.  If you were a little slow, the data would have been damaged.

The next time I used a floppy was when I had my own PC.  It was an XT-clone, with a Phoenix BIOS, no hard disk, but all of 1MB RAM, running on a top-speed of 10MHz (turbo mode).  It had a CGA monitor from Thomson.  And it had cooling problems.  And yes it used 5.25-inch floppies.  It actually had two floppy drives:  one of 360KB and the other of 1.2MB capacity.  I also found out that I had an allergy of sorts as I got rashes on my neck when I was in front of the computer for too long.  A note on the 1.2MB floppy disk, though this was more expensive than the regular 360KB, we used it for archival purposes.  We used diskcopy to force copy a 360KB disk to the 1.2MB.  We figured that there was more data integrity that way.

The next PC I had used 3.5-inch floppy disks.  It still had a 5.25-inch floppy disk drive along with the 3.5-inch drive.  It was an AT-class 286 with a Hercules monochrome graphics card, and a paper-white monitor.  It also had a 40MB hard disk.

I had a floppy drive on all the computers I bought, till around the 2001, when I gave up on the floppy drive.  Since that time, I had asked that the floppy drive not be included as part of the specifications.  Though the use of USB flash drives have not picked up yet, I just thought to re-use or recycle old diskette drives from the computers I had replaced.

The diskette was fun for a while.  It it worked, it worked fine.  If it didn’t, I just broke open the case had the plastic metal recording material coated plastic inside ripped out.  It’s something physical for me to do so that I wouldn’t have useless diskettes lying around the desk.

With the use of flash drives, internet storage, large hard disks, CD/DVD burners, the floppy disk has receded in use and utility.  Mainly it’s not large enough anymore.  When storing a typical picture file on floppy disk, I doubt if there’d be more than 10 files saved on a single floppy.  And storing an MP3 is out of the question.

But the floppy has not yet disappeared.  It’s still very much a part of the desktop computer.  Beside the recovery boot disk, there is still that one use which is ubiquitous but barely noticeable.  When you use a word processor or a spreadsheet, the save button on the screen is most probably an icon of a diskette.