The Last Days Of The Floppy Disk

For most of my computing life, the floppy disk was one of the most normal objects in the room. Documents, homework, small programs, configuration files: these moved between computers on a square piece of plastic small enough to disappear into a pocket. The 1.44 MB capacity of the 3.5-inch high-density disk — the format that became standard in 1987 — felt reasonable because many of the things we wanted to move were small enough to fit.

Now, in December 2006, the floppy is becoming an artifact.

The transition

IBM introduced the 8-inch floppy disk in 1971 as a way to distribute microcode for mainframes. The 5.25-inch format followed in 1976, smaller and more practical for personal computers. Sony developed the 3.5-inch format in the early 1980s, and by the late 1980s and through the 1990s, the 3.5-inch HD disk was the universal medium for software distribution and personal file transfer.

Apple removed the floppy drive from the original iMac in 1998 — a decision that was criticized as arrogant at the time, but that reflected an early read on where storage was going. The iMac shipped with a CD drive and a USB port. External USB floppy drives were available for $50 if you needed one.

The alternatives took several years to arrive in force. Zip drives (Iomega, 100MB and later 250MB) were a partial solution in the late 1990s, expensive but capable. CD-RW drives allowed rewritable optical storage but required software and a few minutes to burn. The decisive replacement arrived more quietly: USB flash drives, first commercially available in 2000 (Trek Technology, 8MB, about $50), have dropped in price and grown in capacity every year since. In December 2006, a 512MB drive costs around $15–20. It holds the equivalent of 355 floppy disks and fits in a pocket without the mechanical fragility.

What is lost

I do not miss the technical frustrations: the disk that refused to read on the second machine, the failed backup discovered at the worst possible moment, the cheerful announcement that a disk could not be formatted. One 1.44MB disk held a comfortable amount in 1995 and became inadequate almost faster than I noticed.

But I miss the physicality of the medium in a minor way. Saving a file to floppy was a visible action: insert the disk, hear the drive engage, see the light, wait. Storage felt like a physical event with a beginning and an end. USB flash drives make the same transfer nearly invisible.

The floppy disk will become fully historical when the generation that used it as a normal object ages out. A curious thing is that the icon for “save” in almost every application — including modern ones — is still the image of a 3.5-inch floppy disk. Many people who use this icon daily have never touched the object it represents. The symbol outlasted the technology it described, which is a strange kind of immortality for a storage medium from 1987.

I still have a few floppy disks in a drawer. I am uncertain what is on them, and uncertain whether I could read all of them if I tried. Magnetic media degrades over decades. The data may already be gone, stored in a format on a medium attached to hardware that is increasingly difficult to find. That is the right ending for a physical storage medium: slowly unreadable, even if still present.