Did You Forget About Floppies?
Saturday July 11, 2009
The floppy disk was considered a revolutionary device at the time for it's portability which provided a new and easy physical means of transporting data from computer to computer. However, today the floppy disk is going the way of the dinosaurs as newer portable media becomes available and many computer systems no longer have a floppy disk drive as standard gear. Photo of flippy disk provided by Freephotos.
I have been using floppies for a long time, and even today, I still use them for small files that I want to write protect. As an interesting aside, just how big IS a floppy? If you use Rich Text Format to store text documents, a page of rich text will be around 3 K Bytes. That means a 1.4 Megabyte floppy holds over 450 pages, or the equivalent of an entire book.
I work part-time for a company I won’t name here, but they have completely banned USB flash drives, because they said someone brought a virus into their network in a USB flash drive. But, they still allow the use of floppy disks in their machines, so even today, I save important files there both on the hard drive in the machine I can use, and I also save those important files on floppies, just in case there is a hard disk crash in my machine. I have survived two crashes already, with people looking at me in disbelief as I reloaded all of my important data files and text files back into my new machine in a matter of minutes and resumed work.
I Always use my wifes floppies !
The fact that we have a big boeing/airbus in the air does not make a single engine aircraft irrelevant or useless. We could still help those learning how to use computer access to cheap and portable means of storage.
I’m an inventor from Carmel, California and one of the invention heros in our area is Finis Conner who stacked up a bunch of floppies with a rubber band around them and with Alan Shugart invented the hard drive. The company became Seagate Technologies and the rest is history.
I wonder if you ever heard of Dr. Nakamats, who says he is the inventor of the floppy disk. He is Japanese and holds the record for inventions, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, with over 3,200 to his credit—three times that of Thomas Edison. Dr. Nakamats claims that he licensed about a dozen of his patents related to the floppy disk technology to IBM Corporation in 1979 and a spokesman for IBM said that the company has an “ongoing relationship” with Nakamatsu,