A Floppy Story- An Obituary!

Once upon a time there lived a big floppy and there lived a small floppy.

It was a time long gone.
Yes, 7-8 years seem a long time.
When was the last time I saw the big floppy and the floppy drive with a handle like a door knob to hold back or lock it! Must be 8 years, 10? Seems like a lifetime since the early days of desktop.

We maybe running a little late compared to the Americas, but we caught up eventually.
Back to floppies. Then, suddenly the big Floppy vanished. To be honest, I never used one, at least directly. I grew up with the smaller ones, and I used to carry them. Oh! Yes, carry I did. At least a dozen. If I had to split a huge file, we had file splitter and of course archiving with winzip~( remember! enter disk 1, enter disk 3, enter disk 1 again, file in disk 1 corrupt....krrreeeee), we had to carry back ups. One out of three floppy will not work, that is if you are lucky.

First it was the black floppy, then came the colored ones. There was Imation and there was sony. They were the more reliable ones. After sometime came transparent ones with the black disk tape inside visible. I had those too. With file size increasing by the day, and a CD writer out of the student budget, Floppies used to frustrate me aplenty. I used to eye those Iomega, optical storage devices. Thank god I never bought one of those overpriced optical devices.

It was the days when carrying floppies were a matter of pride, “I carry more Floppies than you do”. People used to carry the 10 floppy packs in their hands in a very matter-of-factly way.
Even Autorickshaws take out the plastic cover and stick those black discs, that is, those auto wallas who still hadn’t got himself a CD.
But as the crow flies, people were getting frustrated by the day with the unreliability of the floppies and the non availability of a better and affordable substitute. Then CD writers price dropped. And so did CD’s. It was more economical to write a 12 rupee CD than take your chance with a 20 rupee floppy( there even was a floppy with guarantee). But still, writing a CD just to transfer a file was not too appealing either and a rewritable CD was costlier, another fact was CD’s were very bulky( which I believe is one of the major reasons for the success of IPods0..
Then came the thumb drive. God save the Taiwanese. We could afford thumb drives.
And how convenient, they are. People who used to pride themselves carrying a dozen floppies, now hide thumb drives in their pockets since it is prohibitted to carry thumb drives inside the premise of most companies these days. And even though It was costly, the benefits outweighs it. And, it was so small, it appealed to everyone. That you could carry a whole late 90’s hard drive in a drive smaller than your thumb. It appealed to me. And even though a thumb drives have been banned in the premises of many MNCs, it is still easy to sneak one in.
To make it more enticing, you can load the whole OpenOffice.org 2 can be loaded onto a thumb drive. Yes, install and load onto a thumb drive. That means you don’t have transfer the OpenOffice into the computer to use the application. Just plug in the thumb drive with the OpenOffice and start using it.

It so appealed to users that we have laid to rest, the story of the floppy.
Rest in peace.

PS: Silverine would have done a much better job on this.. Silverine, if you may redo the Obituary........