floppy

Floppy, short for floppy disk, is a removable magnetic storage medium enclosed in a protective shell. It was a common method for storing and transferring data from the 1970s into the early 2000s. The name derives from the flexible magnetic disk at the core, in contrast to rigid hard disks used in the same era.

Floppy disks came in several sizes. The 8-inch format was the first widely adopted, introduced in the 1970s. The 5.25-inch disk followed and became the mainstream in early personal computers, with capacities expanding from tens of kilobytes to about 1.2 MB on high-density variants. The lighter, smaller 3.5-inch format, introduced in the 1980s, offered a hard protective casing and became dominant, standardizing at 1.44 MB for high-density disks; a 2.88 MB extended-density option was produced but much less common.

Operation and format: data are stored magnetically on a thin oxide layer of a plastic carrier. A drive spins the disk while a read/write head positions over tracks and sectors to read or write data. Disks must be formatted for use; they are vulnerable to magnetic fields, moisture, heat, and physical damage, and they have limited longevity compared with modern storage.

Decline and legacy: with optical media, USB flash drives, and cloud storage, floppy disks declined rapidly after the late 1990s. They remain in occasional use for legacy hardware, certain embedded systems, or archival tasks, and the term floppy is sometimes used more generally to describe something that is flexible rather than rigid.