The Floppy Disk

For two decades the floppy disk was how data left the computer. You saved your work to a thin magnetic disc in a plastic sleeve, slid it into your pocket, and carried your files to another machine — software shipped on them, students handed in essays on them, whole companies ran on shoeboxes of them. At the mid-1990s peak some five billion were in circulation.

Then storage outgrew it on every axis at once. A single CD held hundreds of floppies’ worth of data; a USB flash drive held thousands and never wore out; the cloud meant you didn’t carry files at all. Capacities that once seemed generous — 1.44 megabytes — became smaller than a single photograph. Sony, the last major manufacturer, stopped making 3.5-inch floppies in 2011. The disk itself is gone, but it achieved a strange immortality: it survives as the “Save” icon on screens everywhere, a picture of an object that a whole generation has tapped a thousand times and never once held.