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The History of the Floppy Disk
Esther Schindler writes "Ready for a nostalgic trip into the wayback? We had floppy disks long before we had CDs, DVDs, or USB thumb-drives. Here's the evolution of the portable media that changed everything about personal computing. 'The 8-inch drive began to show up in 1971. Since they enabled developers and users to stop using the dreaded paper tape (which were easy to fold, spindle, and mutilate, not to mention to pirate) and the loathed IBM 5081 punch card. Everyone who had ever twisted a some tape or—the horror!—dropped a deck of Hollerith cards was happy to adopt 8-inch drives. Besides, the early single-sided 8-inch floppy could hold the data of up to 3,000 punch cards, or 80K to you.'"
Yes, Steve Jobs popularized floppies with the Apple II, but he wasn't always so lucky. At the time the NeXT Computer came out, the lack of a floppy drive was a serious problem. Sneakernet was alive and well in those days, and uploading files via the network required bizarre things like Kermit and ZModem. And the NeXT magneto optical drive was horrendous. NeXT did eventually introduce a floppy in 1991, pretty late in the game. Of course, NeXT was way ahead of its time, the computer that the world wide web was invented on. and a precursor to OS X and iOS.