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Technology Tap
Technology Tap
The Rise and Fall of Floppy Disks: From 5.25" to 3.5" Storage Revolution
Remember that satisfying click of inserting a floppy disk? The nerve-wracking moments waiting for your term paper to save? The frustration of "Please insert disk 5 of 12" during game installations?
Join Professor J-Rod on a nostalgic yet informative deep dive into the technology that defined personal computing for two decades. This special two-part episode explores the complete evolution of floppy disk technology, from the fragile 5.25-inch bendable disks that freed us from cassette tape storage hell to the iconic 3.5-inch rigid squares that became synonymous with saving files.
You'll discover how Steve Wozniak's elegant disk controller made the Apple II a revolutionary educational tool, why IBM's adoption of floppies standardized business computing, and how Sony's durable design conquered the market. Experience what daily computing life was like when storage was measured in kilobytes instead of gigabytes, when installing software meant performing a "floppy ballet" of disk swapping, and when sharing programs meant physically handing someone a disk.
Beyond the technical details, we explore the cultural impact of floppies—from schoolyard software trading to office workarounds and the shareware revolution that changed software distribution forever. Learn fascinating hacks like cutting notches in disks to double storage capacity or taping over write-protect tabs to unlock commercial software.
Though floppies have long disappeared from modern computers, their legacy lives on every time you click that save icon. Whether you lived through the floppy era or are curious about the physical artifacts behind digital nostalgia, this episode connects today's seamless storage solutions to their humble, square-shaped ancestors.
Share this episode with someone who remembers the distinctive sound of a disk drive or a younger person who's never experienced the anxiety of a "Disk not formatted" error. Let's celebrate the technology that taught us to save early and save often!
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Art By Sarah/Desmond
Music by Joakim Karud
Little chacha Productions
Juan Rodriguez can be reached at
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Hi and and welcome to technology tap. I'm professor j-rock. In this episode we're going to discuss the five and a quarter and the three and a half inch floppy. Let's get into it. So Welcome back to the Technology Tap. I'm your host, professor J-Rod, and this is part one of our feature-length journey into the age of the floppy disk. Today we're going to slow down, rewind the clock and really dig into what it was like when floppy disk wasn't just a nostalgic symbol but the heartbeat of computing.
Speaker 1:Let's begin with a 5.25 inch floppy drive, the medium that took computers from hobbyist kits and universal labs into classrooms, offices and living rooms the cassette tape problem. Picture this it's 1977. You're sitting in front of an Apple II or maybe a TR-80. Your storage medium a cassette tape recorder hooked up with clunky cables. You type load, program and press play. You wait and wait. Minutes tick by, the machine screens as data streams in. Maybe after 5 minutes, maybe after 20, you have your game loaded, unless the tape slipped or the volume was too low or someone bumped the recorder. Then back to square one. Anecdotes Kids in school labs often had to rewind the tape three or four times just to load. Oregon Trail Teachers learned to start loading lessons during lunch, just to be ready by class time. This was an environment that screamed for something better. Enter Schubert Associates.
Speaker 1:Alan Schubert, who had worked in IBM's original eight and a half inch floppy disk, knew cassettes wasn't cutting. In 1976, his company introduced the SA400 drive and the new five and.25 inch diskette. The size wasn't random. Engineers literally folded a sheet of paper over an 8 inch disk and thought that's about right. Big enough to store useful data. Small enough to sit neatly on a desk. The first version stored 110 kilobytes per size. To us today that's a text message.
Speaker 1:Back then it was freedom, the Apple II and Wozniak's genius. Steve Wozniak sold the potential immediately. Apple's first computer used cassettes, but Woz designed a cheap, elegant disk controller that slashed the cost of floppy drives. Apple's disk tool, released in 1978, made the Apple II far more usable. Weird world impacts. Schools bought them by the hundreds. Suddenly, students can play math drills or write essays in minutes instead of hours. Games like Mystery House became immersive because floppies could store graphics and sounds that cassettes never could Story. One teacher recalled lining up 30 kids in the front of an Apple II computers, each propped in a disc two and loaded Oregon Trail by the time the bell rang they died of dysphonia, but hey, the software actually loaded like the Oregon Trail right.
Speaker 1:Ibm PC and the business standard. Then came 1981, ibm pc. Ibm chose the five and a quarter inch disk as the main storage. That decision didn't just affect ibm, it set the standard for the entire clone industry. Suddenly every pc compatible machine shipped with a 5.25-inch drive.
Speaker 1:In offices employees lived in a rhythm Insert the system disk, pc DOS, swap to the application disk, either Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect. Swap again for the data disk which is spreadsheets. If you had a single drive you might swap disks dozens of times in an hour. Dual drives were a blessing, one for system, one for data. Real-world story Accountants described the end-of-the-month reporting as floppy ballet, every few minutes, swapping disks in and out in a perfect rhythm.
Speaker 1:Technical growth the five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy didn't stay static, it evolved. The 5.25-inch floppy didn't stay static, it evolved. Single-sized, single-density, 110 kilobytes, double-sided, 360 kilobytes. High-density, 1.2 megabytes. By the mid-80s. For comparison, the ENOC, the first electronic computer, could store 20 words in memory. A single high-density floppy in 1985 held the equivalent of millions of ENAC words. Fun hack Some users cut an extra notch into the disk, unlocking the flip side.
Speaker 1:Boom, double the storage. Risky, but for cash-strapped students it worked. Life with the 5.25-inch disk. Let's slow down and really live in this world. At home a teenager sits across, legged by beige PC clone swapping Ultima II disk. Each change means a pause, the world of the drive and then more exploration. In schools kids share floppy boxes, swapping programs. They copy from magazines. Hey, I've got basic games from Compute, want a copy? In the offices the secretary filed away rolls of label floppies, payroll 1982, quarter four, client list, confidential Letters to vendors. It was physical, tangible. You could hold your whole business in a shoebox of floppies, the push for better.
Speaker 1:But the 5.25-inch disc was far from perfect. Bend it and it was ruined. Leave it in the sun and it warped. Dust of fingerprints, instant read, error. And let's not forget capacity. Software was exploding in size and 1.2 meg wouldn't cut forever. We were all frustration gamers installing King Quest 3 from 6 floppies sometimes found this 5 corrupted Game over. That was it. The industry needed something tougher, smaller and more reliable. Enter Sony 3.5-inch floppy, in part one of our special.
Speaker 1:We followed the rise of the 5.25-inch floppy disk, the soft bendy workhorse that brought personal computing to homes, schools and offices. But as the 1980s rolled on, those disks began to show their weakness Fragile, awkward and too small for the growing appetite of software. Now it's time to tell the story of the three and a half inch floppy disk, the sturdier, more portable and, ultimately, iconic square that defined the 80s and 90s. This was the floppy that many of us grew up on, let's dive in. This was the floppy that many of us grew up on, let's dive in Sony's big idea.
Speaker 1:In 1981, sony engineers unveiled a radical new design the 3.5-inch micro floppy, encased in a rigid plastic shell, unlike the bendy 5.25 sleeve, protected by sliding metal shutters that automatically opened. Inside, the drive included a right protect tab, a simple but brilliant way to lock important discs, small enough to fit in a shirt pocket without bending. So I remember these three and a half inch floppies actually worked with them and they had the the little right protect tab that you can use it. And if you wanted to use, let's say, like a lotus 123 disc, it was right protected. But if you put a little bit piece of tape over it, guess what? You can use it. So those were the little hacks that we, that we learned in the 80s and the 90s, though I used it in the 90s. The first version stored three, three, 360 kilobytes, 720, and later 1.44 megs, the version that will become the global standard.
Speaker 1:Sony engineers reportedly tested durability by tossing disks across rooms, stepping on them and even spilling coffee. They survived. Their resilience was the selling point, and I remember dropping coffee on a couple of them. You just got to dry it out.
Speaker 1:Sony wasn't the only one. Other companies tried their own micro floppy designs Hitachi's 3-inch disk, adopted briefly by Amstrand in Europe, dyson's 3.25-inch floppy. Even IBM toyed with alternatives before picking a winner. It was the classic format wars. For a while you walk into a computer shop and see competing disks, each incompatible with the other, and that was a big problem in the 80s and the 90s. Compatibility and there was really really, really no standards. Standards were when standards came across. Pc. That was when I think it exploded. But there was no format back then, no standard. By the mid 80s Sony's 3.5 inch design won why Ruggedness, capacity and early adopters. Apple leads the way. Apple took the lead first In 1984, the original Macintosh 120K shipped with a 3.5 inch drive.
Speaker 1:Steve Jobs wanted a disc that felt modern and durable, something that matched the Mac's sleek design. For Mac users it was love at first. Click. No more bent disks, no more dust ruining a project, just a neat, compact little square you can slip in your pocket. Weird world story.
Speaker 1:College campus in the mid-80s saw students walking around with back floppies sticking out on their backpacks like badges of tech savviness. Ibm makes the standard. The turning point came in 1987. Ibm launched the PS2 line of computers and chose the three and a half inch disk as the new default. That move standardized the format across the entire PC industry. Suddenly, the same disk worked on IBM's PCs, macs, amigas, ataris and more I don't know.
Speaker 1:It managers in the office rejoiced. No more juggling incompatible formats. Secretaries can finally exchange disks between departments without converting it. That must have been a pain. I didn't live through that. Everyday life with a three-and-a-half-inch floppy.
Speaker 1:This is where the floppy culture hit its stride. Schools, students saved essays and projects on labeled floppies, some decorated disks with stickers, treating them like personal accessories. Teachers handed out assignments that literally say turn it in on disk. Workplace Filing cabinets and desk drawers overflow with neatly labeled floppies. Payroll invoices, quarterly reports and law firms' entire cases lived on. Box of disk Gamers PC classics, monkey Island, doom, simcity.
Speaker 1:Disk gamers, pc classics, monkey island, doom, sim city, all shipped on multiple floppies, installing made feeding disk after disk. Please insert this five to continue. Everybody remembers that, right, we're world memory. Many of us spent late nights swapping disk mid install, praying we haven't lost this 7 of 12. It was a rite of passage. Imagine installing a game and you can't find one of the disks. You needed them all in order to install the game, or the game would not run. It would not run without it.
Speaker 1:What we used to do in the office is we would get a program. We would make copies of the programs, right, whatever it was Lotus, 123, or WordPerfect and then use the copies as standard and always save the original ones, the original ones we barely used. We made copies of the original ones. That way, anything ever happened. We at least still had the original ones. But you know, we made a bunch of copies of you know programmed disks because we didn't want to use them to install on people's PCs, because if they got ruined, that was it. And we were able to take some of this stuff home, right, you know, if you had a PC at home, we just made copies for you. If you wanted Lotus 1, 2, 3 at home, we could make a copy of it and you could take it and use it at home. Back then you only paid once and that was it. That was a big problem in the industry.
Speaker 1:All right, shareware and the disk economy. The 3.5-inch floppy also fueled the shareware boom. Magazines included cover disks full of demos, utilities and free programs. Magazines included cover discs full of demos, utilities and free programs. Companies like Opagi and ID Software used floppies to distribute early versions of games Wolfenstein, commander, keen and Doom. Computer clubs and classrooms became hubs of disk swapping. Privacy and innovation thriving side by side. Reflection this was the original viral distribution system, not downloads like we do now. Now we download and use. You know all those other programs that we used in the early 2000s, right, napster, shareware, bearshare. All that we did it with floppies. We did it with floppies back in the day.
Speaker 1:Capacity and hack Standard and double density disk were 720 kilobytes. High density were 1.44 megabytes and the rare extended. I sorted very few times 2.88 megabytes, never really caught on. Sorted very, very, very few times. Hacks were common, formatting 720 kilobyte disk as 1.44 meg.
Speaker 1:There was a hack. There was a command that you can do. I forgot what the command was. Maybe format A slash 4, I think it was. Someone remind me. If you remember what the command was, email me at professorjrod at gmailcom, but I think it could have been format a colon, slash four. And it did it anyway, covering the white protect tab with tape to unlock this. This is what I said earlier, right we? If you have, like lotus, one, two, three, you're not using it, or maybe you lost this four, this five, and you still have disc 1, 2, and 3. You can use it. You put a piece of tape over it and you can unlock the disc.
Speaker 1:Bootleg copies of games traded in schoolyards, like basketball cards, yeah, and in offices too. We used to do that all the time. So reliability and real-world failures. The 3.5-inch disc was far tougher than its predecessor, but not indestructible. Bad sectors ruined countless essays the night before they were due.
Speaker 1:Disk-not-formatted errors became infamous and you just wanted to scream. Users tried blowing dust off or lightly tapping the drive in desperation. Real world story In 1993, the New York Times lost part of a story draft when a floppy corrupted Journalists grumbled to retype from hard copies the printed copies. They had to retype everything. That's terrible.
Speaker 1:By the mid-1990s the floppies were showing its limits. Games like Myst and Windows 95 shipped on CDs. Hard drives grew big enough that users didn't rely on floppies for daily storage. Zip drive and early USB sticks offered more capacity. The symbolic moment came in 1998 when IBM's original iMac shipped without a floppy drive. Critics gulfed, but Apple was right. Within five years, floppies were gone from the new PCs. You know how many floppies it took you to upgrade to Windows 95? It took you 13 floppy disks to upgrade to Windows 95. That was just to upgrade 21 disks for the full installation of Windows 95. And again, like I said, if one was bad, it's over. It's over, johnny, it's over, it was over for you. Real world notes. Even in the 2000s, bios updates still shipped on floppies. Nasa used them for shuttle diagnostics.
Speaker 1:As late as 2011, even our cultural legacy even after the decline, floppies live on the same icon. A three and a half inch disc remains in word, excel, photoshop and countless apps. Many young people recognize the icon but never seen the physical object. So what they mean is if you go to Word, the save button, the save icon, what does it look like? It looks like a floppy. It looks like the three and a half inch floppy because that's how we used to save before right, by using the three and a half inch floppy. So it still lives. You know, in our memory it's still there.
Speaker 1:Right, most of you kids out there have never seen, probably never seen, a three and a half inch floppy. But you know, if you it's funny, you know they say what if you give it to your kids, or you know, or you yourself, the young people that are listening, would you know how to use it? Would you know how to navigate a floppy disk right? Probably not right. A lot of the commands were DOS commands that you needed to do on it, and I find a lot of people don't nowadays don't really know how to use DOS commands. But you know, if you see a floppy there, try to use it, see what's in it. But you know we don't really have.
Speaker 1:They still sell floppy drives. I know Amazon has them. Of course you could always get it on eBay if worse comes to worse. But yeah, the days of the floppy are over. I think the government still uses it. For the one thing about the floppies and that's why the government still uses some of it is you can't hack a floppy, right? You can't. How you're gonna hack a floppy disk unless it's inserted into the computer. It's, it's, it's it's hack proof. So that's a good thing. I think the government still use it. I wouldn't be surprised if they did. So. That's a good thing, I think the government still use it. I wouldn't be surprised if they did. All right, retro computing enthusiasts still swap games on Amigas and Atari using floppies. Collectors prize an open box of brand-new Sony, verbatim, 3m, aztec artifacts.
Speaker 1:The floppy was more than a storage. It was a cultural connector. Sneakernet, physically walking files between office or classrooms, was the forerunner of file sharing. The floppy carried not just data but memories, right. So just remember, you know flop. The floppy is gone, both floppies, the three and a half and, uh, five and a quarter, and even the eight inch that we talked about earlier. Right, we talked about the first episode that we did on. This included the eight inch floppy. They're all gone, but they remained in some of our collective memory, right, some more than others.
Speaker 1:If you watch older movies, if you want to see them in action, watch older movies. Any movies from the 80s, war Games has the floppies. You know any other movies during the 80s and you see the floppies the eight inch, the five and a quarter, the three and a half. There are good, good, good.
Speaker 1:You know it takes me back to the day when I, when I watched those movies and I see that, you know, it just brings you back to a simpler time, you know, when things were a little bit easier Well, not easier, but they were different, right, I think. I think life is more difficult now, but things are a lot easier now. So I mean technology. I've seen the rise of technology go really, really, really, really fast. I mean you slow down.
Speaker 1:The last, it was a period there for the last 10 years it was nothing really innovative come out. Now, you know, the ais have come out. That's going to be the next, the next big thing. So we, we've seen a lot. Us older folks, if you're listening, we've seen a lot. Us older folks, if you're listening, we've seen a lot, a lot of things in the last couple of 10, 20, 30 years. You know, since we were little kids, you know, from the internet to you know, even do anything without our phones because of multi-factor authentication that we needed all the time communicating right text cell phones. It's made our life easier, but I feel, at the same time, it's also made our life more complicated. All right. And that brings us to the end of part two of our Age of Floppy disk special.
Speaker 1:The three and a half inch floppy wasn't just a better storage medium. It became the cultural symbol of saving our homework, our games, our reports and our creativity. It lived in our backpacks, desk drawers and filing cabinets and powered an era Between the five and a quarter inch and a three and a.5 inch. The floppy defined two decades of computing and although it has been long since replaced, it lives on every time you click on that little save icon. Next time, on Technology Tap, tap, we'll look at what we. What came next? The zip drive, the so-called super floppy that promised to carry us into the new millennium. I'm professor j rod and this has been technology tap. Thanks for spending time with me on this journey through the floppy history. Share this with someone who remembers swapping disks and, as always, keep tapping into technology. This has been a presentation of little cha-cha productions art by Sarah, music by Joe Kim. We're now part of the PodMatch Network. You can follow me at TikTok at ProfessorJRod that's J-R-O-D. Or you can email me at ProfessorJRod J-R-O-D at gmailcom.