Chapter 8
Floppy Drives: Relics
and Memories
In This Chapter
Counting the bits on a floppy disk
Spinning a tale of floppy mechanics
Doing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place
A
floppy drive used to matter. Really.Today it seems impossibly slow, ridiculously small, and of little use in a time
when we have networks, CD and DVD drives, flash memory keys, and wire-
less interconnects. And although the floppy drive is probably nearing the end
of its usefulness on laptops and PCs, it still has a role for some users as a
cheap and simple way to exchange information between one machine and
another. Way back in ancient times we even had an affectionate name for its
use: sneakernet.As in, pick up this disk and walk it across the room to that
other machine and plug it in.Its other use, also declining in importance, was as an emergency way to boot
the operating system. Today most laptops have a CD or DVD that can hold
the boot tracks and much, much more.1.4 Million Bits of History............................................................................
When the first personal computers came out, the first mass storage medium
was the floppy disk drive. The original IBM PC, like the one that collects dust
in the back of one of my storage closets, shipped with one 3-inch tall, 5.25-inch
wide, single-sided disk drive that could hold all of 160 KB of data. And it truly