- PC HARDWARE -

A floppy drive used to be standard hardware on ALL PC's and they read a 3.5" hard plastic disk that has a storage capacity of 1.44 MBytes.   This little guy has more history than any thing else in your computer because it has been around, as is, since about 1986.  It was considered one of the most important pieces of hardware in your system because  it was normally the first thing used to configure a system, and without it you had no way of starting your system if your hard drive failed.  Before the CD ROM, using a floppy was the ONLY way to load software on a system, and some programs (like MS Office) had over 60 floppy disks to load before you were finished (took a l_o_n_g time!).

This device is, however, becoming extinct with the advent of the flash drive and SD card.