HOW TO... Access files stored on old floppy disks
By Nik Rawlinson
What you need: External floppy drive Time required: 30 minutes
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hen Apple released the first iMac in August 1998, it wasn’t only the unusual translucent case design that got the world talking. Many traditional PC users were astounded that the machine on which Apple was building its future lacked one of the most fundamental pieces of hardware in a modern machine: a 3.5in floppy drive.
Optical drives were mainstream by then, but they hadn’t yet unseated floppy disks as the primary means of storing and sharing data. So, how were we meant to back up our files without a floppy drive? How were we going to share them with one another? Come to that – how on earth were we going to install software?
The answer, it turned out, was all tied up in the ‘i’ in the iMac’s name: internet. While the iMac might have lacked a floppy drive at the front, it had a modem and networking components around the back. It’s impossible to overstate how radical this was. Back then, such features were almost always optional extras – usually expensive, and frequently confusing and time-consuming to set up.
If Apple hadn’t taken these risks, we probably wouldn’t have iPods, iPhones and iPads. And if Apple hadn’t used iMac to launch the iPod, and the iPod to launch the iPhone, we might still be using push-button ‘dumb’ phones rather than pinching and swiping, listening to podcasts on the move, emailing on the commute, and avoiding traffic jams courtesy of CarPlay and Android Auto.