1.44 MB to 2 MB of Storage Awesomeness!
Before the “cloud”, external hard drives, SD/microSD cards, and even the USB flash drive, the floppy disk was the way to conveniently store and transport computer documents data.
I wouldn’t have a computer for quite some time, so having a floppy disks was the closest thing to owning a computer. So to the floppy disks I held on dearly as it stored my important school documents and various images. I remember when Pokemon first came out and our local KTLA television channel was the station that broadcast the Pokemon episodes, they mentioned to visit their website to look at the gallery pictures of 150 Pokemon, I fitted as many of those pictures I could on these floppy disk. I may have taken up maybe two floppy disks. The storage capacity is anywhere from 1.44 MB to 2 MB, less after formatting the disk. But hey, at the time that was a lot of storage space when it came to portable data storage devices.
Floppy disks colors in the beginning were, more or less, related to the consumer electronics and home computer colors at the time. Whether it was an IBM-compatible computer, a Macintosh computer, or the Sony Trinitron television, floppy disk were available in black like most television sets or that light gray color that was popular among most home computers.
Sometime later during the 1990s (I know…I seem to mention this decade a lot), Floppy Disks were offered in stylish solid colors like the ones in the picture above. I do not know, but if I had to guess, it may have been related to other electronic trends around the mid-decade like the Gameboy Pocket and the Gameboy Color.
By the end of the decade and leading into the 2000s, floppy disks were available in a variety of colorful, translucent physical format. Again, just an opinion of mine and I have no fact to back it up, but from what I remember around that time was the new iMac G3 computers just came out in 1998 which were available in a variety of translucent colors like green and blue, Volkswagen had just reintroduce a car called the New Beetle that looked like no other car on the road and was also available in a variety of bright colors, and the Nintendo Gameboy Color and Nintendo 64 had also offered versions of the game consoles in a variety of translucent colors.
In the early 2000s, and around the time I had just entered college, I continued to use the floppy disk for a while. By then something called the flash drive (sometimes we even called it the “jump drive”; not sure if people still say that today) that was a more capable storage device in a smaller physical format. I think at the time it was either 64MB, 128MB, or 256MB was the size of my first flash drive. As time went on, the floppy disk was slowing phased out and even computer manufacturers began excluding the floppy disk drive from their products.
Although I have no actual use for the floppy disks now, I still keep them around today. I don’t think I currently own a floppy disk drive. Why do I still keep them? Perhaps it’s for sentimental value. Perhaps it’s out of nostalgia. Perhaps it’s because I wouldn’t know where I would get floppy disks if I ever got rid of them and later on want to get floppy disks again for some reason. Perhaps I think it would be funny if a friend ever tells me, “wow, those would make awesome coasters,” but I would never mistreat such an important item of technological history.