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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 9/15/2004: |
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The death of an computer old
friend – the floppy disk , or as Mark Twain said, the rumors of my
death are much exaggerated ... If’
you’ve bought a new computer in the past year or so you may have
noticed that most of the major vendors have made a change in the basic
computer hardware configuration – most of them now come without a
floppy disk. So if you want one, you have to pay $ 20 – 50 more for the
luxury of being able to copy data from your computer to an external media. For the
past several years floppy disks haven’t actually been floppy;
they’ve been the 3.5” hard plastic disks which store 1.44 Mb of
data. So why are they called floppies when they don’t flop? Because
the first disks that most pc’s used actually were floppy – and
some were the great big 8” floppies which were sometimes called
“elephant ears” , like in some old cp/m pc’s around the
late 1970’s, and others were the 5.25” floppies which the apple
II and other early pc’s used.
This was a magnetic round paper thin disk encased in a bendable outer
container that actually contained a cloth type inner surface which would
supposedly keep the disk clean from dust particles. I think I
recall that with one the early systems that used the dual 8” elephant
ear floppy drives, you would have a megabyte of online storage – an
incredible amount of data at the time, considering that many of these early
computers had as little as 2K of RAM for the program code and the data to
operate in, and 16 K was considered a lot of memory. Amazingly,
when IBM introduced the IBM PC in 1982, a floppy disk was an expensive
option, and the original IBM PC had a data port on it so that you could use a
tape cassette player for program storage. And if
you think storing and loading computer programs on a cassette tape is crude
and slow, before that - they used paper tape. In the original first pc – The Altair
introduced in January 1975 – programs were loaded in via a paper tape
reader. Or you just re-entered them each time you turned the computer off and
on if
you couldn’t afford a teletype paper tape reader. And notice I
don’t say you rekeyed them – because
this computer didn’t have a keyboard – you actually entered the
program by flipping switches on the front console. And what
has led to the demise of the floppy disk? Networking for one – it seems
now that most businesses, homes, and the entire world is networked, so that
you can just send any file through the network to another computer, instead
of having to copy it onto a floppy disk and handing over the floppy disk. Of,
even more common, virtually everyone uses the internet, so you just email the
file someone wants to them. No need for a floppy anymore. So does
this mean we can all save at least $ 20 on new computer by getting them
without a floppy disk? Not quite so fast, as we still have to deal with the
routine computer task of backing up our data onto some external media, and
I’ll talk about that next week. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2004 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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