Wed 09 April 2025

I was reading Clayton's blog post about his habit of buying larger and larger USB thumb drives back in the day (when they were getting rapidly larger every few months), and it reminded me of a wish I had in the 2000s that got only partially fulfilled.

As anyone who knows me well enough to wager a guess as to my age can tell you, I grew up in the days of floppy disks. They were the standard way that everyone carried their data around (although few actually carried floppies on them all that regularly).

Apple users carried Apple floppies, Commodore users carried Commodore floppies, Atari, Atari, etc. They weren't remotely cross-compatible. Heck, on the Apple ][, the floppy drive was completely software-controlled, and you could have incompatible floppies on the same system! We didn't get a universal floppy standard until non-PC machines like Macintoshes gained the ability to read DOS-formatted floppies in the very late 1980s, as the High Density Mac floppy drives were compatible with PCs (they did so by abandoning the superior variable RPM encoding scheme used by lower density Macintosh floppies, and thereby lost about 29% of their potential capacity).

Ten years later, and floppy disks were basically useless, their 1.44 MiB capacity a joke compared to the demands of file storage of that era. While there was an obvious successor to the 1.44 MiB floppy: a 2.88 MiB floppy, it never gathered widespread adoption, and NeXT is the only manufacturer I recall using it (maybe IBM, as well). There were zip drives, LS120 "floptical" drives, Jaz drives, Syquest, and any number of other competing standards, and lacking a single clear successor, the floppy died. The original iMac, released in 1998, was the first well-known and ubiquitous computer to not ship with a floppy drive, similar to the NeXT machine that Steve Jobs unveiled a decade before.

In the early "naughties" (the term I enjoy using for "the two-thousands"), recordable optical media such as CDs and later, DVDs became the de-facto removable media for use on computers, but they never quite replaced floppies, either. They were fragile, easily scratched, and in most cases, you couldn't just "drag" files over onto the optical drive. You had to use authoring software, and even though Windows XP tried to make it as intuitive as possible, you still were just saving a local copy onto your hard disk until you were ready to "burn" all the files out to disk as a session. In addition to that, not all burned CDs/DVDs worked on all readers, especially older ones.

Simultaneously, flash media started becoming ubiquitous. At first, they were an expensive novelty, not having much storage: the first flash drive I bought in 2002 was a whopping 32 MiB. That's not a typo. It was the equivalent of a mere 22 floppy disks.

There was a problem with flash media, though: you generally had to plug it in in the back of your PC (or you'd be smart and get a USB-A extension cable), and they tended to be quite bulky, having large plastic or rubberized cases/bodies. PCs soon adapted with front-facing USB ports, but there was one thing I still missed: having an eject button (or software command)! The thumb drives hung out the front of your PC and could get damaged if you were walking by your PC without thinking and whacked it with your knee.

Still, they were very convenient, and I carried one with my keys for several years, but they never really became the floppy disk replacement. Close, but no cigar.

The funny thing is that we do have a standard removable storage format today! It has plenty of capacity, has a standard size, fits inside your computer (not hanging out the front), is cheap, and almost every computer has a port for it! It's the microSD card! I know, you'll try to curb your enthusiasm. What are we supposed to do with those tiny things, glue them to a fingernail? Buy the world's tiniest wallet to keep them in?

Well, they are good for espionage, at least. Snowden-approved! ;)

100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 18

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing Humor Non-religious post Retrocomputing