One might lose track of either a paper notebook or a 3.5-inch diskette from the early 1990s, but upon retrieval, the former will be easier to read.
Software is typically stored on an external long-term memory device, such as a hard drive or magnetic diskette.
Compared with the storage capacity of the conventional hard disk, that of such a "soft" diskette is low under three million characters.
A recent development, the digital camera, makes it possible to bypass the film/paper step completely by capturing the image into the camera's random-access memory or a special diskette and then transferring it to a personal computer.
It came on a diskette I purchased in a shop in Kadıköy, my neighborhood at the lip of the Bosphorus.
The monitor could only squeeze in 25 lines of text, and the basic model had 40 kilobytes of built-in read-only memory, barely enough to store the words in this column, and 16 kilobytes of user memory — or 256 kilobytes if you added two diskette drives.
He led the A.N.C. from exile in London for nearly 30 years, acting as the public face of the anti-apartheid movement and in later years communicating secretly via computer diskette with Mr. Mandela, the film reveals.
We have eliminated outdated terms (diskette, DAT).
"By 1994 you had Dorling Kindersley publishing a range of multimedia titles for a consumer market," Phillips said, also pointing to the collection of texts on diskette, If Monks had Macs, which appeared in 1988.
At under three pounds and less than three-quarters of an inch thick (excluding its diskette and CD-ROM drives), the notebook, which starts at $1,999, is as light and slender as many of the slightest notebooks.
Had the computer industry simply settled on a standard, the diskette would have died out years ago.
