Where’s My Floppy?

Remember the floppy disk? Back when it was really floppy, it came in an 8 and 5.25 inch variety. Before our PCs had hard drives, all of our software and data was stored on these disks and we had stacks and stacks of them. (Keep that magnet away!) I still remember the little sleeves we kept them in and the foil sticky tabs that would cover the write-protect notch.

As technology always does, the package got smaller and the capacity increased with the 3.5 inch disk. With a hard plastic outer case, some innocents would refer to these as “hard” disks. Along with the rugged enclosure, the write-protect tab was greatly improved, but 1.44 Megabytes soon proved too small for any important data. Pictures, movies, music, and other large files quickly made this capacity obsolete. With multi-mega-pixel cameras, a single picture would not even fit on one.

The CD-ROM seemed to fix this for a while. “Burn a CD,” seemed a much more powerful order than “copy to a floppy.” I think people just like to say “burn.” (I don’t remember smelling anything burning.) But the mere 750 MB of a CD-ROM just delayed the problem. Although the blank CD-ROM was fairly inexpensive, it was such as waste to create a CD just for transportation and not be able to reuse the medium.

Even email became a work around. People would email files to themselves, or each other, to get information from one computer to another. Of course the very limitation of the floppy and CD was a challenge to the email solution as larger files meant longer transmission times and many email systems impose size limitations as well.

Another challenge came when computers simply stopped shipping with floppy drives as a default option. For a long time, software installation was done via CD, and there was little use for the floppy drive at all.

In between all of this were a variety of storage solutions. From Iomega, the ZIP drive had some short-lived popularity, while the Clik! drive didn’t seem to go anywhere.

No news flash here (pun alert), but the USB Flash drive has become the new floppy. It has evolved from all of the other solutions being small in size, high in capacity, quick in access time, and very portable. They can range in capacity to a few MBs to at least one gigabyte. Simply plug the drive into your computer, and it is instantly ready to use.

Their small size and high capacity does introduce a security issue. These drives are so easy to lose, that you must be careful about how you store the data. Some have encryption features to protect the entire drive or some of its directories. Personally, I have already found two flash drives but neither had any data that gave a clue as to whom they may belong to. This leads me to an important tip I learned: Create a text file on your flash drive called IF FOUND.TXT and put your contact information in it. If you are willing to offer a reward, mention it. If the drives I found had this file, I would have returned them immediately.

If you don’t already have one of these drives, get one.

Shop for Flash drives at Amazon.com.

2 comments May 9th, 2006