Where Are Floppy Disks Today? Planes, Trains, And All These Other Places

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

I don't remember when I first started using a floppy disk in the mid-70s. It was either installing firmware on IBM S/370 mainframes or on a dedicated library workstation to create Library of Congress catalog records. Oh, the exciting life I've led! In either case, it would have been a single-sided, 8-inch floppy disk, which held an amazing 79.7 KiloBytes (KB) of data.

[...] As personal computers gained popularity in the 1970s, the floppy disk moved from my world of mainframes and workstations to PCs. There, it found its place as an affordable and accessible storage solution.

Then, in 1976, a guy named Steve Wozniak wanted to add a floppy drive to his next computer. His buddy, Steve Jobs, got a 5.25-inch floppy disk from Shugart's new company, Shugart Associates, in 1976, and after a lot of hacking, Woz got the first floppy drive to run on what would become the Apple II.

[...] It wasn't just major companies, either. Floppy disks enabled anyone to create and sell programs, which sparked the freeware and shareware movements. They also enabled people to share data easily for the first time. Long before we were using modems and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) to share programs, pictures, and data, we would share them by "sneakerware." That is, literally walking the information from one computer to another by hand carrying disks.

[...] By the early 2000s, floppy disks had become increasingly rare, used primarily with legacy hardware and industrial equipment. Sony manufactured the last new floppy disk in 2011.

Despite its obsolescence, the floppy disk's legacy endures. Its iconic design has become a symbol of data storage, and the floppy disk icon still appears on many computer desktops as the file-saving symbol.

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