Where are floppy disks today? Planes, trains, and all these other places
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.
Hey, trust me, that was a big deal then when our other portable storage choices were IBM 12-row/80-column punched cards or 9-track tape. They were, in a word, cumbersome.
Floppy disks predated me getting my feet wet in computing. In the late 1960s, IBM engineers Alan Shugart and David L. Noble envisioned a compact and portable solution for storing data. This pioneering work, Project Minnow, led to the creation of the first commercially viable 8-inch floppy disk in 1971. Its 79K of storage may seem like nothing to you, but it held the equivalent of 3,000 punched cards.
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.
