Forty years ago IBM presented a prototype of the first floppy disc. The mass production of these disks in the West would come later, but in the USSR this event was seen as no more significant than two meteorites colliding in the Kuiper Belt. However, it is now clear that there is something to think about here: this clumsy eight-inch innovation by IBM’s specialists provided everyone, including residents of the USSR, a new level of freedom, the possibilities of which we could not even begin to imagine.
Of course the floppy disc in 1970 was a sort of Homo habilis of its species. The first eight-inch discs could hold about 80 Kb – which today amounts to no more that a couple Word files. The floppy disc was compacted to 5 inches in 1976, followed by the appearance of a three-inch disc with 360 Kb capacity, and then the breakthrough 3.50-inch disc with 1.44 Mb cam out in 1987. The magnetic disc was king throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, and then computer world shifted to compact discs, and the floppy’s era was over. Now we have zip drives, flash cards, memory cards, not to mention the Internet. In reference to earlier times, the floppy today remains the icon for the “Save” button in the WORD program. But all of its decedents continue to fulfill the main function of the floppy – to distribute and multiply information via a few clicks of a mouse or buttons on the keyboard.
The freeing of information from its physical carriers was as revolutionary as the invention of the printing press. Or perhaps even more so, but it remains too early to tell. In any case the role of the floppy is only slightly less significant than that of the personal computer itself. The PC made it possible to free up information from numerous types of its physical manifestation – books, albums, drawings, magnetic reels, etc. – however, without a means of transferring this information, the computer would in essence be silent. It was the floppy disc that provided convenient and free movement of this new form of information, and the Internet can be considered in principle as its replacement, offering kilometers of fiber-optic cables in place of magnetic plates in plastic envelopes.
Much can be said about the topic of how computerization has changed the world. We have already stopped noticing that we live in the future. This article is being written on a computer and is read on a computer, and its potential audience (given the availability of translation programs) is about 1 billion people. But to get a sense of the meaning of this anniversary, in Russia it is best to look at our own historical experience, which it turns out is quite unique: the golden age of the floppy disc coincided with the end of the USSR and appearance of new countries in its place.
Computers with floppy drives appeared in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s. This was a time of stagnation, when the needed for change was apparent, but neither the authorities nor society at large recognized this. Just like the reformist ideas, the first PCs remained something exotic for a select group, although information had already begun circulating from floppy to floppy. Without them, for example, it is unlikely that Alexei Panzhitov could have invented Tetris, which in 1985 captured the hearts and minds of Moscow and then the entire world.
In the second half of the 1980s no one denied the need for change. Computers and floppy discs also lost their exotic flare, although for a wide segment of the population they remained inaccessible. Reform in the country ended with the breakdown of the entire system, and it was right after this the public began to purchase computers in large numbers: 286s, 386s, 486s and then an unsinkable flotilla of Pentiums. It quickly became apparent that the old system of transferring information was not powerful enough, and floppies began to lose ground to CDs, not to mention the birth of Runet in 1994. But now, in 2010 it would be difficult to find a new computer on sale with a floppy drive.
Of course, attempting to tie the fall of USSR to the appearance of floppy discs is something in the realm of science fiction. Nonetheless, there is actually is a correlation, albeit not a cause-effect correlation. Life in the information age, which has replaced the astrological age, has become much more complicated, dynamic and turbulent. And this is what brought the computer and floppy disc to life – new social conditions required new technologies. The USSR, to the contrary, had for the previous 20-30 years slowed its development, grew frigid and blocked itself off from change, ending up obsolete, like a steam engine.
As a result, the computerization in the Soviet Union ended up being something of a pregnancy test – a very real sign of coming changes. The floppy disc, the first means of communication between computers, was not the reason for these changes, but without it would be impossible to have launched into the future with its MP3 players, online-banking, Live Journal, Wikipedia and the widespread electronic mobility that we have today. Of course, the engineers of IBM probably thought nothing of this in 1970 – what do the communists have to do with this? But now, with the dust settled, we can ponder the correlation between this innocent technological invention and our own social revolution.
