The Rise and Fall of Floppy Disks: From 5.25" to 3.5" Storage Revolution

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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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:25):
Hi and and welcome to technology tap.
I'm professor j-rock.
In this episode we're going todiscuss the five and a quarter
and the three and a half inchfloppy.
Let's get into it.
So Welcome back to theTechnology Tap.

(01:10):
I'm your host, professor J-Rod,and this is part one of our
feature-length journey into theage of the floppy disk.
Today we're going to slow down,rewind the clock and really dig
into what it was like whenfloppy disk wasn't just a
nostalgic symbol but theheartbeat of computing.
Let's begin with a 5.25 inchfloppy drive, the medium that

(01:32):
took computers from hobbyistkits and universal labs into
classrooms, offices and livingrooms the cassette tape problem.
Picture this it's 1977.
You're sitting in front of anApple II or maybe a TR-80.
Your storage medium a cassettetape recorder hooked up with
clunky cables.

(01:52):
You type load, program andpress play.
You wait and wait.
Minutes tick by, the machinescreens as data streams in.
Maybe after 5 minutes, maybeafter 20, you have your game
loaded, unless the tape slippedor the volume was too low or
someone bumped the recorder.
Then back to square one.

(02:13):
Anecdotes Kids in school labsoften had to rewind the tape
three or four times just to load.
Oregon Trail Teachers learnedto start loading lessons during
lunch, just to be ready by classtime.
This was an environment thatscreamed for something better.
Enter Schubert Associates.
Alan Schubert, who had worked inIBM's original eight and a half

(02:36):
inch floppy disk, knewcassettes wasn't cutting.
In 1976, his company introducedthe SA400 drive and the new
five and.25 inch diskette.
The size wasn't random.
Engineers literally folded asheet of paper over an 8 inch
disk and thought that's aboutright.
Big enough to store useful data.
Small enough to sit neatly on adesk.

(02:58):
The first version stored 110kilobytes per size.
To us today that's a textmessage.
Back then it was freedom, theApple II and Wozniak's genius.
Steve Wozniak sold thepotential immediately.
Apple's first computer usedcassettes, but Woz designed a
cheap, elegant disk controllerthat slashed the cost of floppy

(03:21):
drives.
Apple's disk tool, released in1978, made the Apple II far more
usable.
Weird world impacts.
Schools bought them by thehundreds.
Suddenly, students can playmath drills or write essays in
minutes instead of hours.
Games like Mystery House becameimmersive because floppies
could store graphics and soundsthat cassettes never could Story

(03:44):
.
One teacher recalled lining up30 kids in the front of an Apple
II computers, each propped in adisc two and loaded Oregon
Trail by the time the bell rangthey died of dysphonia, but hey,
the software actually loadedlike the Oregon Trail right.
Ibm PC and the business standard.
Then came 1981, ibm pc.

(04:07):
Ibm chose the five and aquarter inch disk as the main
storage.
That decision didn't justaffect ibm, it set the standard
for the entire clone industry.
Suddenly every pc compatiblemachine shipped with a 5.25-inch
drive.
In offices employees lived in arhythm Insert the system disk,
pc DOS, swap to the applicationdisk, either Lotus 1-2-3 or

(04:32):
WordPerfect.
Swap again for the data diskwhich is spreadsheets.
If you had a single drive youmight swap disks dozens of times
in an hour.
Dual drives were a blessing,one for system, one for data.
Real-world story Accountantsdescribed the end-of-the-month
reporting as floppy ballet,every few minutes, swapping

(04:54):
disks in and out in a perfectrhythm.
Technical growth thefive-and-a-quarter-inch floppy
didn't stay static, it evolved.
The 5.25-inch floppy didn'tstay 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, thefirst electronic computer, could

(05:18):
store 20 words in memory.
A single high-density floppy in1985 held the equivalent of
millions of ENAC words.
Fun hack Some users cut anextra notch into the disk,
unlocking the flip side.
Boom, double the storage.
Risky, but for cash-strappedstudents it worked.

(05:41):
Life with the 5.25-inch disk.
Let's slow down and really livein this world.
At home a teenager sits across,legged by beige PC clone
swapping Ultima II disk.
Each change means a pause, theworld of the drive and then more
exploration.
In schools kids share floppyboxes, swapping programs.

(06:01):
They copy from magazines.
Hey, I've got basic games fromCompute, want a copy?
In the offices the secretaryfiled away rolls of label
floppies, payroll 1982, quarterfour, client list, confidential
Letters to vendors.
It was physical, tangible.
You could hold your wholebusiness in a shoebox of

(06:24):
floppies, the push for better.
But the 5.25-inch disc was farfrom perfect.
Bend it and it was ruined.
Leave it in the sun and itwarped.
Dust of fingerprints, instantread, error.
And let's not forget capacity.
Software was exploding in sizeand 1.2 meg wouldn't cut forever

(06:46):
.
We were all frustration gamersinstalling King Quest 3 from 6
floppies sometimes found this 5corrupted Game over.
That was it.
The industry needed somethingtougher, smaller and more
reliable.
Enter Sony 3.5-inch floppy, inpart one of our special.

(07:13):
We followed the rise of the5.25-inch floppy disk, the soft
bendy workhorse that broughtpersonal computing to homes,
schools and offices.
But as the 1980s rolled on,those disks began to show their
weakness Fragile, awkward andtoo small for the growing
appetite of software.
Now it's time to tell the storyof the three and a half inch
floppy disk, the sturdier, moreportable and, ultimately, iconic

(07:36):
square that defined the 80s and90s.
This was the floppy that manyof us grew up on, let's dive in.
This was the floppy that manyof us grew up on, let's dive in
Sony's big idea.
In 1981, sony engineers unveileda radical new design the
3.5-inch micro floppy, encasedin a rigid plastic shell, unlike
the bendy 5.25 sleeve,protected by sliding metal

(08:00):
shutters that automaticallyopened.
Inside, the drive included aright protect tab, a simple but
brilliant way to lock importantdiscs, small enough to fit in a
shirt pocket without bending.
So I remember these three and ahalf inch floppies actually
worked with them and they hadthe the little right protect tab

(08:20):
that you can use it.
And if you wanted to use, let'ssay, like a lotus 123 disc, it
was right protected.
But if you put a little bitpiece of tape over it, guess
what?
You can use it.
So those were the little hacksthat we, that we learned in the
80s and the 90s, though I usedit in the 90s.
The first version stored three,three, 360 kilobytes, 720, and

(08:46):
later 1.44 megs, the versionthat will become the global
standard.
Sony engineers reportedly testeddurability by tossing disks
across rooms, stepping on themand even spilling coffee.
They survived.
Their resilience was theselling point, and I remember
dropping coffee on a couple ofthem.
You just got to dry it out.

(09:09):
Sony wasn't the only one.
Other companies tried their ownmicro floppy designs Hitachi's
3-inch disk, adopted briefly byAmstrand in Europe, dyson's
3.25-inch floppy.
Even IBM toyed withalternatives before picking a
winner.
It was the classic format wars.

(09:30):
For a while you walk into acomputer shop and see competing
disks, each incompatible withthe other, and that was a big
problem in the 80s and the 90s.
Compatibility and there wasreally really, really no
standards.
Standards were when standardscame across.
Pc.
That was when I think itexploded.

(09:50):
But there was no format backthen, no standard.
By the mid 80s Sony's 3.5 inchdesign won why Ruggedness,
capacity and early adopters.
Apple leads the way.
Apple took the lead first In1984, the original Macintosh
120K shipped with a 3.5 inchdrive.

(10:11):
Steve Jobs wanted a disc thatfelt modern and durable,
something that matched the Mac'ssleek design.
For Mac users it was love atfirst.
Click.
No more bent disks, no moredust ruining a project, just a
neat, compact little square youcan slip in your pocket.
Weird world story.
College campus in the mid-80ssaw students walking around with

(10:33):
back floppies sticking out ontheir backpacks like badges of
tech savviness.
Ibm makes the standard.
The turning point came in 1987.
Ibm launched the PS2 line ofcomputers and chose the three
and a half inch disk as the newdefault.
That move standardized theformat across the entire PC

(10:54):
industry.
Suddenly, the same disk workedon IBM's PCs, macs, amigas,
ataris and more I don't know.
It managers in the officerejoiced.
No more juggling incompatibleformats.
Secretaries can finallyexchange disks between
departments without convertingit.
That must have been a pain.

(11:14):
I didn't live through that.
Everyday life with athree-and-a-half-inch floppy.
This is where the floppy culturehit its stride.
Schools, students saved essaysand projects on labeled floppies
, some decorated disks withstickers, treating them like
personal accessories.
Teachers handed out assignmentsthat literally say turn it in

(11:34):
on disk.
Workplace Filing cabinets anddesk drawers overflow with
neatly labeled floppies.
Payroll invoices, quarterlyreports and law firms' entire
cases lived on.
Box of disk Gamers PC classics,monkey Island, doom, simcity.

(11:54):
Disk gamers, pc classics, monkeyisland, doom, sim city, all
shipped on multiple floppies,installing made feeding disk
after disk.
Please insert this five tocontinue.
Everybody remembers that, right, we're world memory.
Many of us spent late nightsswapping disk mid install,
praying we haven't lost this 7of 12.

(12:14):
It was a rite of passage.
Imagine installing a game andyou can't find one of the disks.
You needed them all in order toinstall the game, or the game
would not run.
It would not run without it.
What we used to do in the officeis we would get a program.
We would make copies of theprograms, right, whatever it was
Lotus, 123, or WordPerfect andthen use the copies as standard

(12:39):
and always save the originalones, the original ones we
barely used.
We made copies of the originalones.
That way, anything everhappened.
We at least still had theoriginal ones.
But you know, we made a bunchof copies of you know programmed
disks because we didn't want touse them to install on people's

(13:00):
PCs, because if they got ruined, that was it.
And we were able to take someof 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 athome, we could make a copy of it
and you could take it and useit at home.
Back then you only paid onceand that was it.
That was a big problem in theindustry.

(13:21):
All right, shareware and thedisk economy.
The 3.5-inch floppy also fueledthe shareware boom.
Magazines included cover disksfull of demos, utilities and
free programs.
Magazines included cover discsfull of demos, utilities and
free programs.
Companies like Opagi and IDSoftware used floppies to
distribute early versions ofgames Wolfenstein, commander,

(13:42):
keen and Doom.
Computer clubs and classroomsbecame hubs of disk swapping.
Privacy and innovation thrivingside by side.
Reflection this was theoriginal viral distribution
system, not downloads like we donow.
Now we download and use.
You know all those otherprograms that we used in the

(14:03):
early 2000s, right, napster,shareware, bearshare.
All that we did it withfloppies.
We did it with floppies back inthe day.
Capacity and hack Standard anddouble density disk were 720
kilobytes.
High density were 1.44megabytes and the rare extended.
I sorted very few times 2.88megabytes, never really caught

(14:27):
on.
Sorted very, very, very fewtimes.
Hacks were common, formatting720 kilobyte disk as 1.44 meg.
There was a hack.
There was a command that youcan do.
I forgot what the command was.
Maybe format A slash 4, I thinkit was.
Someone remind me.

(14:47):
If you remember what thecommand was, email me at
professorjrod at gmailcom, but Ithink it could have been format
a colon, slash four.
And it did it anyway, coveringthe 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

(15:11):
disc 1, 2, and 3.
You can use it.
You put a piece of tape over itand you can unlock the disc.
Bootleg copies of games tradedin schoolyards, like basketball
cards, yeah, and in offices too.
We used to do that all the time.
So reliability and real-worldfailures.
The 3.5-inch disc was fartougher than its predecessor,

(15:34):
but not indestructible.
Bad sectors ruined countlessessays the night before they
were due.
Disk-not-formatted errors becameinfamous and you just wanted to
scream.
Users tried blowing dust off orlightly tapping the drive in
desperation.
Real world story In 1993, theNew York Times lost part of a

(15:58):
story draft when a floppycorrupted Journalists grumbled
to retype from hard copies theprinted copies.
They had to retype everything.
That's terrible.
By the mid-1990s the floppieswere showing its limits.
Games like Myst and Windows 95shipped on CDs.
Hard drives grew big enoughthat users didn't rely on

(16:21):
floppies for daily storage.
Zip drive and early USB sticksoffered more capacity.
The symbolic moment came in1998 when IBM's original iMac
shipped without a floppy drive.
Critics gulfed, but Apple wasright.
Within five years, floppieswere gone from the new PCs.
You know how many floppies ittook you to upgrade to Windows

(16:44):
95?
It took you 13 floppy disks toupgrade to Windows 95.
That was just to upgrade 21disks for the full installation
of Windows 95.
And again, like I said, if onewas bad, it's over.

(17:06):
It's over, johnny, it's over,it was over for you.
Real world notes.
Even in the 2000s, bios updatesstill shipped on floppies.
Nasa used them for shuttlediagnostics.
As late as 2011, even ourcultural legacy even after the
decline, floppies live on thesame icon.

(17:29):
A three and a half inch discremains in word, excel,
photoshop and countless apps.
Many young people recognize theicon but never seen the
physical object.
So what they mean is if you goto Word, the save button, the
save icon, what does it looklike?
It looks like a floppy.
It looks like the three and ahalf inch floppy because that's

(17:53):
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'sstill there.
Right, most of you kids outthere have never seen, probably
never seen, a three and a halfinch floppy.
But you know, if you it's funny, you know they say what if you

(18:13):
give it to your kids, or youknow, or you yourself, the young
people that are listening,would you know how to use it?
Would you know how to navigatea floppy disk right?
Probably not right.
A lot of the commands were DOScommands that you needed to do
on it, and I find a lot ofpeople don't nowadays don't

(18:34):
really know how to use DOScommands.
But you know, if you see afloppy there, try to use it, see
what's in it.
But you know we don't reallyhave.
They still sell floppy drives.
I know Amazon has them.
Of course you could always getit on eBay if worse comes to
worse.
But yeah, the days of thefloppy are over.
I think the government stilluses it.

(18:55):
For the one thing about thefloppies and that's why the
government still uses some of itis you can't hack a floppy,
right?
You can't.
How you're gonna hack a floppydisk unless it's inserted into
the computer.
It's, it's, it's it's hackproof.
So that's a good thing.
I think the government stilluse it.
I wouldn't be surprised if theydid.
So.
That's a good thing, I thinkthe government still use it.

(19:15):
I wouldn't be surprised if theydid.
All right, retro computingenthusiasts still swap games on
Amigas and Atari using floppies.
Collectors prize an open box ofbrand-new Sony, verbatim, 3m,
aztec artifacts.
The floppy was more than astorage.

(19:36):
It was a cultural connector.
Sneakernet, physically walkingfiles between office or
classrooms, was the forerunnerof file sharing.
The floppy carried not justdata but memories, right.
So just remember, you know flop.

(19:57):
The floppy is gone, bothfloppies, the three and a half
and, uh, five and a quarter, andeven the eight inch that we
talked about earlier.
Right, we talked about thefirst episode that we did on.
This included the eight inchfloppy.
They're all gone, but theyremained in some of our
collective memory, right, somemore than others.
If you watch older movies, ifyou want to see them in action,

(20:20):
watch older movies.
Any movies from the 80s, warGames has the floppies.
You know any other moviesduring the 80s and you see the
floppies the eight inch, thefive and a quarter, the three
and a half.
There are good, good, good.
You know it takes me back to theday when I, when I watched
those movies and I see that, youknow, it just brings you back

(20:41):
to a simpler time, you know,when things were a little bit
easier Well, not easier, butthey were different, right, I
think.
I think life is more difficultnow, but things are a lot easier
now.
So I mean technology.
I've seen the rise oftechnology go really, really,
really, really fast.
I mean you slow down.

(21:02):
The last, it was a period therefor the last 10 years it was
nothing really innovative comeout.
Now, you know, the ais havecome out.
That's going to be the next,the next big thing.
So we, we've seen a lot.
Us older folks, if you'relistening, we've seen a lot.
Us older folks, if you'relistening, we've seen a lot, a
lot of things in the last coupleof 10, 20, 30 years.

(21:22):
You know, since we were littlekids, you know, from the
internet to you know, even doanything without our phones
because of multi-factorauthentication that we needed
all the time communicating righttext cell phones.

(21:43):
It's made our life easier, butI feel, at the same time, it's
also made our life morecomplicated.
All right.
And that brings us to the endof part two of our Age of Floppy
disk special.
The three and a half inch floppywasn't just a better storage
medium.
It became the cultural symbolof saving our homework, our

(22:06):
games, our reports and ourcreativity.
It lived in our backpacks, deskdrawers and filing cabinets and
powered an era Between the fiveand a quarter inch and a three
and a.5 inch.
The floppy defined two decadesof computing and although it has
been long since replaced, itlives on every time you click on

(22:28):
that little save icon.
Next time, on Technology Tap,tap, we'll look at what we.
What came next?
The zip drive, the so-calledsuper floppy that promised to
carry us into the new millennium.
I'm professor j rod and thishas been technology tap.

(22:51):
Thanks for spending time withme on this journey through the
floppy history.
Share this with someone whoremembers swapping disks and, as
always, keep tapping intotechnology.
This has been a presentation oflittle cha-cha productions art

(23:34):
by Sarah, music by Joe Kim.
We're now part of the PodMatchNetwork.
You can follow me at TikTok atProfessorJRod that's J-R-O-D.
Or you can email me atProfessorJRod J-R-O-D at
gmailcom.