[Infowarrior] - Fond Memory: The Short Life Of the Floppy

[Richard Forno]

Fond Memory: The Short Life Of the Floppy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/31/AR2007013102
441_pf.html

By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 1, 2007; C01

The last time I saw Floppy was at the library of Crittenden Middle School in
Mountain View, Calif. It was an early spring morning in 1996. And blue,
square, 3 1/2 -inch Floppy -- tired from a late night of writing and
rewriting -- was his usual humble, upbeat, irreplaceable self.

No more.

This week PC World, one of the largest computer retailers in Europe,
announced it will stop selling floppy disks once its existing stock is sold.
Dell Computer Corp. stopped including floppy drives in its desktop computers
four years ago. Walk into any Washington area high school today and you're
more likely to see a 15-year-old listening to her cassette player -- it's a
retro thing -- than toting a floppy disk storing her 10-page,
doubled-spaced, annotated book report.

Floppy's gone, an artifact of that time back in the day when we called the
new, exciting, mysterious creation of the Internet the World Wide Web.

As Bryan Magrath, commercial director of PC World, told Britain's Daily
Telegraph: "The sound of a computer's floppy disk drive will be as closely
associated with 20th-century computing as the sound of a computer dialing
into the Internet."

It's the same old story told again and again, the march of technology and
time. Remember when you had a pager?

In 1998?

Floppy was born way before that, in 1971, and underwent various makeovers in
the '70s.

The first time I saw Floppy he was really floppy, a 5 1/4 -inch iteration of
plastic with a doughnut hole in the middle. That thing really flopped -- not
as in failed, of course, but as in you could wave it and watch it move. I
thought he was so cool.

But it wasn't until the early 1980s, when personal computers became more
common, that Floppy took off. He was ubiquitous. I got my hands on him as a
sixth-grader at Crittenden. That 3 1/2 -inch Floppy was where I kept my
WordPerfect documents, my Quattro Pro spreadsheets, my whatever needed
keeping.

Then, of course, the CD-ROM came. And these days you can store your MP3s,
video files, Web pages, anything on the Web, in a CD or a USB thumb drive.
Goodbye, Floppy.

Oh, you can visit a few, if you want, probably stored in the same place as
other relics, the eight-track and VHS. It will be next to the Apple IIc,
sitting right atop your Super NES.

"It's weird. It's dead and it isn't, " says 57-year-old Tom Persky of
Floppydisk.com, a one-stop shop where you can buy floppies and get your
floppy files transferred to CDs, among other things.

There are 2 million floppies in his office in Orange County, Calif., he
says, and business is strong. Someone, he says, is always finding a floppy
disk that needs transferring.

See, Faulkner had it right. The past is always with us -- on Floppy.