3.5" Floppy Disk

~ the obit ~

The 3.5 inch floppy was the format almost every personal computer used for portable storage between about 1990 and 2000. It was a 9 cm plastic square with a sliding metal cover, and inside it was a circle of magnetic tape. The full name was "3.5 inch microfloppy disk" but nobody ever called it that. It was just the floppy. Or the disk. Or the diskette, if you were over 50 or french.

We used these at school in the mid 1990s. Every kid in the computer lab had a small plastic case with maybe ten of them. We hand-wrote the labels on the white sticker. We used them for word documents, for the basic games we were trying to write, and for whatever the teacher told us to bring next class. They made a small whirring sound when the drive read or wrote them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it actually worked ~

The disk was technically a circle of mylar tape coated in magnetic material. The plastic case kept it clean. The metal slider on the front opened up so the read head could touch the tape. There was a small hole in the corner that you could slide closed to make the disk read-only. We called this the write protect. It was the only physical security feature most of us interacted with as kids.

The standard capacity was 1.44 megabytes. That is roughly 200,000 characters of plain text. It is not enough for one decent quality photo today. In 1995 it was enough for everything we wanted to save in one school year.

A normal day with a floppy involved putting it in the drive, hearing the click, hearing the whirr, waiting for the operating system to recognize it, and then maybe getting an error message that said "the disk in drive A: is not formatted. would you like to format it now?". We learned the word "format" before we knew what it meant.

~ how it died ~

Three things killed the floppy. None of them killed it alone. Together they killed it completely.

The cd-r and cd-rw. By 1999 most people had a cd burner. A cd held 700 mb. That is roughly 480 floppies. You did not need to save things on multiple disks anymore. You just burned a cd.

The usb stick. Around 2002 cheap usb thumb drives became normal. They held more, were faster, and did not have the formatting and corruption issues that floppies always had. By 2005 every laptop had usb ports and almost no laptop had a floppy drive.

The internet. By the early 2000s, broadband meant you could just email your file or upload it. The whole reason for portable storage was changing. You did not need to physically carry the disk to school anymore. You could mail it from home.

Apple was the first big company to drop the floppy drive, on the original imac in 1998. Most people thought this was insane at the time. By 2003 they looked correct. By 2010 sony stopped making the disks themselves, and the format was officially over.

~ what it left behind ~

The floppy disk lives on as the save icon. Microsoft word still uses it. Photoshop still uses it. There is an entire generation of kids now using software where the save button shows a picture of a thing they have never held in their hands. They do not know what the symbol is supposed to be. It is just the save button.

The other thing the floppy left behind is the file size habit of older people. Anyone who learned computers before 2002 still has a small flinch when a file is more than 2 mb. We grew up doing the math in our heads. "Will this fit?" We do not need to ask that anymore, but the instinct is still there.