The Floppy Disk

Photo By mercenario

Before the flash drive, the DVD, or the CD, there was of course, the floppy disk. At first appearance there was nothing floppy about it; the hard plastic outer case was what protected the thin, flexible, disk inside. A creation from IBM, it was essentially the first portable device for data storage. There were lots of fun things you could do with a floppy, but you always had to worry about accidentally erasing data or  breaking it and losing all of your projects.

Most of us only remember the 3.5 size that by the end of their time you could get in practically any color.

Photo By RaeA

Before that were the 5.25 that only held 360 KB and before that the “super sized” 8 inch floppy disks. I remember my first computer game, StickyBear, came on one of these bad boys. The graphics weren’t that great, but who cared? I finally had a real reason to use a computer!

It’s funny to think that in our grade school careers, these (3.5 floppies) were often on the school supply list. How else were you expected to work on projects and papers both at school and at home? Holding at most 1.44 MB, one project could easily use up more than one. Can you imagine backing up your computer onto a floppy disk? Although it was sad to see these become useless as technology improved, I’ll take my 2 GB flash drive over a floppy any day.

The problem is… what to do with all of them now that they are worthless antiques? Well a lot of creative people have come up with ideas on how to make notebooks, backpacks, pencil holders, and even clothing out of floppy disks.

Photo By rintakumpu

You can find a slew of tutorials on how how to make said floppy disk items online.  For more on the comeback of floppies, check this article.

I recently saw a poster that showed how many 3.5 floppy disks it would take to to store current software such as The Sims, Photoshop, Firefox, or  iTunes. I love the idea of this because you really forget how much space we have now compared to how much we used to have, and for so much less!

Matthew swears he got a floppy disk with Doomsday on it in a cereal box once…. what’s your floppy disk memory?

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