Monday, April 26, 2010

What! No more 'frisbee net'?


My heart dipped when I read the article here.

In 1971, the floppy disk appeared. Invented by David L. Noble of IBM, they were 8" in diameter and had a storage capacity of 81,664 bytes. How things have changed. I started with a Spectrum and cassettes, got a Tandy Model 1, and now (excluding the Interwebtubenets) have several terabytes of storage at my disposal. Should this be insufficient I can easily add more with higher capacity becoming more readily available as technology progresses.

Bear in mind that the total amount of information generated over 10 years ago in 1999 was between 1-2 exabytes of information. This page here puts some meat onto measurements in bytes and so on.

'Frisbeenet' was how information was passed across the office in times of urgent need or general laziness. Flick of the wrist and away your information went.

Floppy disks you will be missed.

Does anyone have an ode to the floppy disk?

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