Every time you press the "Save" button in a program, you are actually touching a small history lesson. That square icon shows an object most young people have never held in their hands, the floppy disk. But the story of the first floppy is stranger than you'd expect: it wasn't invented for users to store files, but for a giant computer to load its own internal software.
IBM's little problem
In the late 1960s IBM's big mainframes needed low-level software called "microcode" to run. This code had to be loaded into the machine reliably and cheaply each time. According to the Computer History Museum, in 1967 Alan Shugart, a product manager at IBM's San Jose facility, assigned David L. Noble to develop a cheap system for this job.
Noble first tried a new type of magnetic tape, but got nowhere. The solution turned out to be magnetic data recorded on a flexible plastic disk. To protect the disk from dust and fingerprints, a jacket lined with cleaning fabric was designed. The name "floppy" comes from this soft disk.
1971: 8 inches, read-only, 80 KB
IBM released its first floppy disk system in 1971. The IBM 23FD drive, codenamed "Minnow", used an 8-inch read-only "memory disk". This disk held 80 KB of data. The Computer History Museum describes this as equivalent to about 3,000 punched cards.
So the first floppy could carry only a tiny fraction of a single photo you take with a phone today. And you couldn't write to it, only read. Its job was to load control code into the storage control unit of System/370 computers. The relevant US patent (3,678,481) was granted on July 18, 1972.
A shrinking disk, growing capacity
The floppy soon stopped being a helper part of mainframes and landed on everyone's desk. First came 8 inches, then 5.25 inches, then the most familiar size, 3.5 inches. Sony introduced its 3.5-inch cartridge in 1981, and in January 1983 the industry settled on a standard based on Sony's design.
The "1.44 MB" high-density floppy that we all remember came in the mid-1980s (sources give dates between 1986 and 1987). Interestingly, even that "1.44 MB" label isn't quite right: the formatted capacity is 1,474,560 bytes, that is, 1,440 KiB. The figure is a naming habit that came from mixing 1,000 and 1,024.
| 1971 | Today |
|---|---|
| 8-inch flexible disk | A fingernail-sized microSD card |
| 80 KB, read-only | Terabytes of writable space |
| Job: loading microcode into a mainframe | Job: photos, video, everything |
| Equal to about 3,000 punched cards | Lives on as the Save icon |
The floppy's long farewell
The floppy withdrew from the stage slowly. According to Wikipedia, Sony ended production of new floppy disks in 2011. But in some places the floppy remained part of official business for much longer. The reason was often not technology but rules written years ago that nobody updated.
The most striking example is Japan. The country's Digital Agency removed 1,034 regulations that required the use of floppy disks in government procedures. Digital Minister Taro Kono announced the completion of the campaign on June 28, 2024 with the words "We have won the war on floppy disks". That was 53 years after the first floppy.
Today the floppy has almost vanished physically, but its icon sits in the corner of every program. That an 80 KB helper part became, half a century later, the universal picture of the idea of "saving" is one of the loveliest coincidences in tech history.
Do you think the "Save" icon should one day turn into something other than a floppy for the new generation, or should it stay as it is?