The floppy disk's history is inextricably tied to the growth of the personal computer.
While an eight-inch version of the floppy dates back to 1967, the first IBM PC shipped with a 5.25-inch floppy in 1981. It held 360 kilobytes of data, which is about a third of megabyte.
It was called a "floppy" drive because the data disc was enclosed in a flexible sheath, but the name stuck even for the far more rigid 3.5-inch version which quickly became standard equipment on PCs for the next two decades.
Until the rise of CDs, floppy disks were the standard medium for how software was packaged, sold, and installed. It wasn't unusual, for example, to get a box with a dozen floppy disks to install a large program (Microsoft Office 97 came on 55 floppy disks). Eventually, not only did software become too large, but even a single user file — like an MP3 song file — couldn't fit on a floppy, which held just 1.44MB.
Despite how universal the floppy was, there was enormous interest in replacing it for standard file transfers. In the mid-1990s, many consumers owned storage drives like the Iomega Zip drive, which read interchangeable 100MB cartridges, for example, and around 2000, USB flash drives finally offered a simple, affordable, and high-capacity solution that's still routinely used today.
1998 was the beginning of the end for the venerable floppy. Apple unveiled the iMac G3, the first personal computer without a floppy, and PC makers slowly followed suit over the next few years. Floppies hung on for a number of years, but Sony — the last floppy disk maker on earth — stopped manufacturing disks in March of 2011.
Even though floppy disks are now totally obsolete, they live on as the "save" icon on many computer programs — even if young people have no idea what it is.