floppy disks – why the iconic storage medium still matters today

 

@brett_jordan, Unsplash

The Floppy Disk
by Ren Alcantara

If you have recently used versions of Microsoft Office, or some similar office suite, and done enough that deserves keeping, you should be familiar with the little icon you hit to start the process of saving. If you're not of legal drinking age, or are not too far removed from it, you may have no idea what that little button represents. In case you've been curious, but too shy to ask, it's a floppy disk.

Before flash drives—heck, before flash memory was a thing we used-data had to be stored somewhere. If you were working exclusively on a local device, that would be okay, since your machine had the internal hard drive on which to save information. That doesn't help you out very much if you needed to share said information. However, opening your computer up, tearing out the hard drive, and having your friend do the reverse wasn't worth the effort just to share your Dungeons and Dragons monster manual. The solution was the floppy disk.

Computers have internal hard drives that have plates, over which a magnetized arm coasts to read and write data. These plates are made of solid metal, earning them the name "hard" disks.

Floppy disks, diskettes or "floppies" on the other hand, had a magnetized plastic disk that's barely thicker than a sheet of paper. Since the disks would never stand up to abuse on their own, the disk was housed in a sealed protective sleeve. Older, larger 8-inch and 5 1/4-inch floppy disks had similarly floppy plastic envelopes, while the more recent 3.5 inchers had a hard plastic shell. It's from these floppies that we get the "save" icon.

When inserted into the drive, a reading head made physical contact with the disk, reading and writing data on the magnetic media. A spindle would slot into a hole in the center of the disk, spinning it, and allowing the read/write head to access the various sectors on the drive. This was a reasonably reliable way to save and share data, though they had the distinct habit of failing just when you needed them to perform.

Since the drives weren't sealed the way hard disks are, they were very prone to dust and debris scratching up the fragile magnetic surface. Since there's actual contact between the read/write head and the aforementioned fragile surface, it was always just a matter of time before the disk gave up and you'd get stuck with the "whirr-clack, whirr-clack" sound of a disk that can't be read.

This proved to be an advantage back in the day, as unscrupulous students in our high school class, desperate for a little more time to meet a deadline, would purposely submit a damaged disk. The teacher, unable to read the data, would then ask for a re-submission, by which time the actual paper will already have been written.

The disks also had limited storage space. The larger disks had capacities in the kilobytes, while the last of the smaller 3.5-inch disks had capacities in the range of 1.44MB, or smaller than an image most current smartphones can take. Some double-density deals had twice that, or barely enough to store a snap from your smartphone camera. Those were simpler times.

The Compact Disk, being digital, compact, slightly more reliable, and cheap was the first blow. Games, which back then were stored on sometimes upwards of a dozen floppies, could be saved on a single CD, with room to spare. The advent of much more reliable storage formats, the constantly dropping price of flash storage, and larger capacities than were practical with floppies or even CDs made sure that last box of new floppies you were saving for an important project would never see the light of day again.

So before you hit the "save" button on your next spreadsheet, text document, or slideshow presentation, spare a quick thought for the floppy disk. They tried as hard as they could.