Microsoft vet revisits the gloriously manual era of write protection

Microsoft's Raymond Chen took a delightful trip down memory lane this week, tracing how write protection for removable media has changed over the decades.

The vast majority of removable media today consists of flash drives, some with a write-protect switch or a software setting to prevent accidental writes. In the days of yore, however, notches and tabs ruled, though their implementation was not always consistent.

Chen began with the eight-inch floppy disk, widely attributed to IBM in 1971, which stored around 80 kilobytes. "The write protect notch was at the top of the leading edge," Chen wrote.

"The presence of a notch made the floppy write-protected, so you started with a write-enabled floppy, and if you wanted to protect it, you punched a notch at just the right spot."

The 5.25-inch disk superseded the eight-inch floppy. Here, the write-protect notch was on the right edge, near the top ...