ABSTRACT
Hard drives, in fact, historically predated floppies, which were once regarded as the more advanced medium. Floppies were media that wore their material particulars on their sleeve, literally: single-sided, double-sided, single density, double density, high density, hard-sectored, soft-sectored—incantatory speech brushing the particulars of magnetic recording technology across the tongue. Floppies were to personal computing what the paperback book was to publishing and mixtapes were to pop music. They made it trivially easy to move material from one computer to another computer, the classic incarnation of the so-called “sneakernet”. The floppy disk, universal iconic token of the obsolescent media, thus becomes the conveyor and purveyor of the very earliest incarnations of a contemporary medium that we are routinely asked to accept as having now assumed its apotheosis in “the cloud”.
