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The Land Before Hard Drives

These days, floppy disks are so disposable and underused that it's hard to remember the era when long-term data integrity was the primary selling point of any floppy brand. But before hard drives became inexpensive enough to be standard computing equipment, users lived and died by their removable magnetic storage. They depended on floppies to store all of their data on a day-to-day basis--a scary thought by today's standards, and even scarier in 1983. That's why every floppy manufacturer went to great lengths to convince users that its disks were more reliable than another maker's, even if most floppies were, in the end, largely the same. Fido didn't seem to care either way.