30 Years of Consumer Storage: From Floppy Disks to SSDs

1. 5.25-inch Floppy Disks
2. 3.5-inch Floppy Disks
3. Compact Cassette
4. RAM Disks
5. Hard Drives
7. Iomega’s High-Capacity/Cartridge Drives
8. Flash Cards
9. USB Flash Drives
10. Solid-State Drives
6 of 10


As was true with cassette tapes, the music industry’s adoption of the optical-based compact disc format also proved a major boon for PC users. A single, durable round disc, smaller than a 5.25-inch floppy yet capable of holding hundreds of times more data, was a no-brainer, particularly for game developers who were rapidly discovering their titles were outgrowing even multiple 3.5-inch disks. (The elaborate Myst, released in 1993, was a crucial early flash point for CDs as a game delivery device, though they were in use for a couple of years before that.) For a time, CDs even offered built-in, top-flight copy protection, though that all changed by the mid 1990s, when burners became more common. DVDs, which could contain multiple gigabytes, are still in major use today; and Blu-ray discs, which can store up to 50GB per dual-sided unit, offer even more plentiful space for high-definition videos and large-scale hard drive backups. As PC users continue to hunger for more and more storage space, chances are that the limitations of these formats will ensure they too eventually fade into computing history as we all ascend into the cloud. But their legacy will always be with us. For better or worse, the CD was instrumental in fostering (or perhaps accelerating) a programming climate where the physical media was truly just the vehicle—programmers at last had all the space they needed to make their fondest dreams come true.