The slow, inexorable, unnoticed death of physical media

Physical media, of course, I mean transportable formats, not your hard drive, which I hope doesn't hang around in your backpack. I'm talking about floppy disks, tapes, punched cards and the like.

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Quick answer: If someone sees a photo on your computer and says "I like it, send it to me", what do you do? If you're old-school, send me an email with the photo attached. If it's more modern, open your phone, access the shared album in the cloud, select "share" and send it to your friend.

It wasn't always so easy.

I know it's hard to believe, but computers haven't always been connected. Period perfectly typical you have several computers in a company, with no way of talking to each other, let alone with computers in other locations. The most common communication protocol is not TCP/IP, time DPLDPC, Floppy Go, Floppy Go.

In some cases, when it was imperative to transfer a large amount of data between two computers, this was called for:

It is a Laplink cable, which using proprietary programming connected the parallel ports between the two computers. The speed was around 115kbps, which was a reasonable period for the time. Incredibly, Laplink still exists and continues to release new products.

Those who started with the 5¼ floppy found the 3½ inch disks to be a huge evolution, and for many years they served perfectly, but Moore's Law gave us more powerful computers, the programming projects became more complex and we got to the point where an installation of Windows 98 required 39 floppy disks, if you were the unlucky corn-digo who didn't have a cd rom drive.

The big change came in 1998, when Apple forced the market and launched the iMac G3, committing the supreme heresy of not including a floppy drive. The only physical media option was a USB stick, itself a novelty, the USB 1.0 standard was released in 1996.

Operating system pendrives coexisted a lot with floppy disks, and several alternative formats emerged, such as the Compressed media drive, the Iomega Snap!, and the more professional versions, such as the Bernoulli disks and the Jazz Drive, also from Iomega, but these solutions pros were professionally expensive, and even the Compressed media drive didn't reach critical mass to become something you could casually lend to a friend to copy some games.

Physical media continued to evolve, flash drives with more and more capacity, memory cards of different shapes and sizes, but never reached the detachment of floppy disks. Nobody begged (a lot of) floppy disks, we always had a box of blank disks for some need, except once when a bad-say, like he asked me to pirate the CorelDraw CD Rom for him. I sent it back with 400 floppy disks. He didn't like it.

The price of flash drives continued to fall. In the beat where I covered technology and attended media events, a common team in the press units came with a flash drive, with tasks os discharges, photos and videos. Excellent period. But like all good things one day come to an end, the pen drives were getting scarce, public square the discharges go tasks to the cloud, the photos and videos in a OneDrive or GDrive connect.

Kids are joked about calling floppy disks a 3D-printed save icon, but when was the last time you used a floppy disk? I do not remember. Pendrive is easier, it was yesterday, I used a double pendrive (USB on one end and microUSB on the other) to transfer files to my xing-ling tablet that I use to read comics. Other than that, my use of flash drives is zero.

Everyday physical media is becoming a niche solution, like a flash drive to load files into a 3D printer.

Professionally, proprietary solutions have kind of disappeared. Anyone who needs to physically transport a large amount of data uses an external hard drive, preferably an SSD.

It's AWS Snowmobile, a shielded holder from Amazon, instead of spending years transmitting data to servers in the cloud, you hire the Snowmobile, it parks in front of your company with a complete datacentre, you pull a cable and transfer up to 100 Petabytes , which are then physically taken to Amazon's datacentre, and the data is downloaded onto its contracted servers.

Alright, back to us mere mortals.

The transition from floppy disks to flash drives was not a smooth one, and in the early days of home computing, floppy disks were the stuff of cheapskates. Young operating system enthusiasts, who've already cut a corner to convince their parents to buy a "computer", which in their view was good for nothing and even missed the television, rarely got the extra for a floppy drive.

The companies' brilliant solution was to find a cheap, ubiquitous storage medium that even a child could use. This peripheral AK-47 was the good old K7 recorder.

Some computers like the Commodore PET came with a recorder included. Others, like the ZX Range, used any recorder available. The Gradiente MSX Master came with the DataCorder DR-1, an almost miniature recorder, with the option to use batteries and time the most beautiful thing in the world.

At standard speed the ZX Range recorded and read data analogically at a speed equivalent to 1,365kbps. A 60-minute tape held the equivalent of 0.6MB, which doesn't seem like much, but a Range program took up a maximum of 48KB.

Products emerged that tried to adapt the VCR as a storage device, mainly for reinforcements, but if the K7 time tape was unreliable, the VCR would go dark. Apathetic Game Audit did a good review on such a system.

Of all these physical media, one in particular I find fascinating, but unfortunately I never came close. It is the medium with which Bill Doors and Paul Allen loaded the first Fundamentals on the Altair 8800 decades ago in Albuquerque and started Microsoft. This media? The perforated tape.

The technology comes from message endpoints, later used in centralized servers. The concept is beautifully simple. The machine uses a paper ribbon with five horizontal positions. Each of them represents a bit. With a hole, it's zero, without a hole, it's one. Task world calls it Baudot, but the format evolved and by the time of Altair Fundamental, task terminal used the Western Association's ITA2 code, to encode the Latin alphabet and some control characters in 5 pieces.

The punched tape is uniquely elegant, it can be used as terminal emulation, sending data as if it were being typed, or directly as serial data.

You store the programs in elegant round boxes. Properly tagged. Your data is immune to magnetic interference type task, paper is a physical medium that does not degrade if you are careful.

Unlike punched cards, it's not a disaster to drop paper tape on the floor.

Despite all this, as soon as it was possible, the perforated tape fell into disuse among the microns. The equipment to punch time tapes is much more expensive than the reader, which is already expensive, and the data density is atrocious. Remember the 0.6MB on a 60 minute K7 tape?

A perforated tape has a density of 10 pieces per inch. Operating system same 600KB as K7 tape, if recorded on paper would require a tape of 12192 meters.

This does not hinder enthusiasts from keeping the technology alive, YouTube is full of projects to restore old equipment, or modern and sophisticated projects using microcontrollers.

Fortunately, for those who don't want to feel too old, you can still find original floppy disk drives, for old equipment, or with a USB connection, for newer ones.

The day they start assembling a 3½ drive by hand, then I'll worry.