The end of an era
'Tis a sad day indeed. The End of a Floppy Era.
This article goes into the passing of an icon for the past 30 years, the Floppy Disk. Although they haven't been "floppy" since the demise of the 5 1/4" disk, the name stuck. I know, I know, the media inside was floppy... Sheesh.
Anyway, with the advent of the Universal Serial Bus and the USB thumb drive, floppys are truly dead. USB drives hold more, are faster and more convenient to tote around.
I started out with computers on a borrowed RCA Elf. It had a whopping 2K of memory, and no storage capability at all. No floppy disk, not even a port to save files and programs to "stringy floppy," i.e. cassette tapes. The whole computer was a bare motherboard, with a Hexadecimal keypad as part of the board. Those were the fun days, when a computer could do anything. Where we wondered how we would fill all of that cavernous memory. Now we have problems running out of memory when we *only* have a gigabytes worth.
Such were the days, when computers were magical items. We never even dreamed of such things as GUIs, the Internet, or instant communications across the world and all that. That was still science-fiction in the 1970's.
I shall miss my floppies, even though I have a 1 gig thumb drive.