There's been a lot of nostalgia circulating around the PC world in the past year, but there's only one element of early home computing history that everyone shares in common: the floppy drive. A guest writer posting at HP's Input Output blog, Steve Vaughan-Nichols, is acknowledging our shared sentimentality with a rare retrospective of those skinny magnetic disks from their beginning to their (effective) end. Many of us are familiar with the floppies that fed our Amigas, early Macs and IBM PCs; Vaughan-Nichols goes beyond that to address the frustrations that led to the first 8-inch floppy at IBM in 1967, the esoteric reasons behind the 5.25-inch size and other tidbits that might normally escape our memory. Don't be sad knowing that the floppy's story ends with a whimper, rather than a bang. Instead, be glad for the look back at a technology that arguably greased the wheels of the PC era, even if it sometimes led to getting more disks than you could ever use. Sorry about that.

[Image credit: Al Pavangkanan, Flickr]

Filed under: Storage, Alt

Writer breaks down floppy drive history in detail, recalls the good sectors and the bad originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Aug 2012 01:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.