The History of the Floppy Disk

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday August 28, 2012 @07:24PM from the once-upon-a-time dept.

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.'"

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I remember the old floppies well by Chrisq · 2012-08-28 19:37 · Score: 5, Interesting

One thing I remember was a colleague spilling sweet hot coffee on a 5.25 inch floppy that had just arrived in the post. We all thought he would have to tell head office that we had just destroyed our latest update disk and get them to send another, but he opened the envelope, took out the actual disk, rinsed it under the tap, and carefully dried it. Next he got a blank floppy, opened this, and substituted the internal disk - finally sealing it with sellotape down the edge. We all said "it will never work", but it read perfectly - the first thing he did was take a back-up of course.