Beginning of Essay
Even before the first commercial computers appeared in 1951, "mass" storage, although minuscule by today's standards, was a necessity. As early as the mid-1800s, punch cards were used to provide input to early calculators and other machines. The 1940s ushered in t ....

Middle of Essay
.... disk drives packed 5 to 10 MB of storage, the equivalent of 2,500 to 5,000 pages of double-spaced typed information, into a device the size of a small shoebox. At the time, a storage capacity of 10 MB was considered too large for a so-called "personal" computer. The first PCs used removable floppy disks as storage devices almost exclusively. The term "floppy" accurately fit the earliest 8-inch PC diskettes and the 5.25-inch diskettes that succeeded them. The inner disk that holds the data usually is made of Mylar and coated with a magnetic oxide, and the outer, plastic cover, bends easily. The inner disk of today’s smaller, 3.5-inch floppie ....