Two technologies from the earlier history of the Internet (Week 2)

 Floppy disks

Floppy disk is a flexible removable magnetic disk (usually encased in a hard plastic shell) for storing data. The majority of us don't use floppy discs anymore, but why? How did the floppy disk become obsolete?

Firstly, floppy disks are not that reliable, as it could seem. They usually were in casing, but even then they were prone to damage. Sometimes the data could be lost even without a physical damage. Obviously there is no data storage that is 100 percent secure, but floppy disks were not the best anyway.

In addition, probably the main reason that floppy disks became obsolete was the storage capacity. The most popular floppy disk could fit in around 1.44 MB of data. In comparison with nowadays, it is unspeakably little. But back in those days, you could even fit entire games on it.

Photo 1: Floppy disks [2]

As people began listening to digital songs and using high resoultion pictures, floppy disks just wasn't quite enough for this task. In addition to that, apllications also started becoming more advanced and complicated. Therefore, people started moving to CD. USB technology was also on the rise, which was a great alternative. Not only did they have a higher storage capacity, but they were also more reliable due to flash medium. 




ASCII
ASCII or abbreviation of Amercian Standard Code for Information Interchange, a standard data-transmisiion code that is used to represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices.

ASCII standard was promulgated in 1963 by the American National Standards Institute, specifying the pattern of seven bits to represent letters, numbers, punctutaion and control signals in computer. The ASCII code became very popular by encoding characters of emails and html pages. The codes of ASCII are usually exhibited in a table, called the ASCII table, containing different symbols associated with each code, as well as their descriptions and decimal/binary code representations.

Photo 2: ASCII table [4]


Nowadays, we take ASCII for granted and don't even think that it survived such a long time and we still use it. Now ASCII is a widely used standard for encoding text documents on computers. In other words it is used to translate computer text to a human text, since all computers speak in a binary language.





References:

https://databackupdigest.com/floppy-disk-obsolete.html [1]

https://www.easytechjunkie.com/what-are-floppy-disks.htm [2]

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=803 [3]

https://www.asciitable.com/ [4]

https://www.baeldung.com/cs/ascii-code [5]

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