Floppy Disks

Remember actually-floppy disks?

I’m talking about those flat squares that were almost like a folder with a flat circle inside, like a rigid goth version of a Valentine’s Day card.

Now there’s a good name! Well done, IBM inventor team.

The thing was literally a floppy disk inside of a plastic or vinyl sleeve, also a bit like opening a new LP from the record store. I was exposed to these little suckers pretty early on, both in terms of my own life and in terms of when they were introduced to the market.

This style of floppy disk was the first widespread, mainstream way to store data for computers. That’s because computers were anything but mainstream before the late 70s and early 80s, when they began to invade suburban neighborhoods in meaningful numbers.

The floppy disks I grew up with are a sign of my time. They had grown from an existing, much larger floppy disk used for IBM mainframe computers. Businesses with one of those giant mainframe systems would add a disk drive beginning in 1971, which would read from 8 inch floppies.

Smaller computers meant smaller floppy disks, so Wang Laboratories (heh) hired a company called Shugart Associates to create a smaller (5.25 inch) disk for use with these new microcomputers, as they were buzzingly called. Today, we call them computers or desktops or laptops.

Then, something funny happened.

They made a new disk that wasn’t floppy, and it began to replace the floppy disks. That’s not the funny part, though! At first, there was a strong need to differentiate between the new 3.5 inch storage disks, so they were called either diskettes (kinda makes sense) or microfloppies, which only makes sense when you learn that the 5.25” floppies I’ve been talking about this entire time were called minifloppies at first.

Okay, it was floppy on the inside, so maybe they get a technical win here. This is kind of like saying someone is hard-headed, then pushing back since their brain is soft on the inside.

Still, it was weird for me to observe everyone now calling these very hard, rigid plastic things floppy disks when I knew full well that there was already something else called floppy disks out there.

I think I called them hard disks, but very few others did. Instead, they were differentiated as hard floppies, which might take the cake for the worst name ever.