Today, via Hacker News, I came across a Wired article about why the floppy disk just won’t die.
It’s fascinating that in 2023 so many businesses and industries still seem to be dependent on an anachronistic storage medium, which not only isn’t really known to be robust, but also offers, by today’s standards, ridiculous little actual space. But, you know, if it works, it works.
Apparently the disks become less and less available, and those that you can get ahold of are of poor quality:
“They are very sensitive and prone to failing, so at best we can use each one around three times, then we have to throw it away.”
Which is twice as sad if something scarce just ends up as plastic waste.
Now, I’m an old fart and I used to play video games on 5.25" floppies on the Commodore C64 (with the iconic 1541 disk drive, and yes, I even had a little cutter to make the disks double-sided), but my most recent interaction with floppy disks wasn’t even that long ago.
In 2015 my father, who was 79 years old at the time, decided that he’d like to “go on the internet”. His ancient desktop PC, which he had bought second-hand around the turn of the millenium, still stuck on Windows 98, was hopelessly outdated. He hadn’t used a computer at all until a couple of years after his retirement, and there wasn’t much on it except his treasured spreadsheets where he kept track of his monthly expenses.
So he inherited my old Thinkpad laptop which had WiFi and was perfectly equipped to surf the Web. But it was crucial that I would copy the spreadsheets from his old computer to the new one. This turned out to be a little problematic, as it had no network connection and not even a USB port - just the ubiquitous 3.5" floppy drive, state-of-the-art for a mid-1990’s personal computer.
Well, there I was, in 2015, shopping around for a pack of 3.5" floppies and a portable floppy disk drive with USB port that I could attach to the Thinkpad. I was honestly surprised how easy it was to source those items on Amazon, and a couple of days later I was able to move his precious files.
My father still happily uses the Thinkpad. I haven’t used neither the floppies nor the drive since then, but what I and millions of computer users all over the world still use to this day is the “Save file” menu item in many popular software applications, and guess what, even in the most modern Microsoft 365 reiteration of Word or Excel this is still a floppy disk icon.