So I had better start at the beginning. Encouraged by the speed at which I could write using a computer word processor, I abandoned pencil and paper a couple of years ago. I gave my fancy electric typewriter to my daughter and stashed all my old notebooks on the top shelf of my closet. Word processing, by itself, is truly a wondrous thing. I diskovered this the very first time I found out how easy it was to change one sentence or one paragraph without retyping an entire page.
Words become unbound, freed from the restrictions of paper and ink.
But none of the glory of word processing would last beyond the flick of a computer's on-off switch without a storage device. For nearly all personal computer word-processing systems, that device is the common floppy disk. The name is a misnomer, since the disk is not really floppy at all. Basically, the floppy disk is round, usually five and one-fourth inches in diameter, coated with the same kind of magnetic material that covers cassette tape, and enclosed in a lubricated plastic jacket. When it is snuggled into a disk drive, a floppy disk spins at about 300 rpm while a read-write head'' records or plays back computer data.