Floppy disks are in the news lately, as they're still being used by Air Traffic Control systems today. I laugh as news reporters state that most people don't even know what they are.

Then they hold up a 3½-inch floppy to the camera, and I have to laugh again. Those little hard plastic disks with a sliding metal shutter were invented in 1981 by Sony, took a while to get popular, and lasted into the early nineties.

But the original floppy was an 8-inch black thing, introduced in 1971 just as I entered the IBM Sys 3 business in the Bay Area. They stuck around until 1976 as the 5¼-inch floppy disk hit the market. In fact, my early software was distributed on the 5¼'s in the early eighties.

Here's some from a 1985 product: