All storage was done outside the computer on floppies; the first floppies were so easily damaged that it was virtually impossible to travel with them.

The idea was to have your operating system (OS) on one floppy and your work on another. The OS was tiny enough that the memory-challenged hardware could hold only about 650 kilobytes.

You would put the OS into the A drive, the computer would 'read' it, then in goes your word processing programme into the A drive and your target floppy into the B drive. So, if you were typing a letter, for example, you would have to first load your OS, then your word processing programme, and in your B drive would be your work floppy where you would type and save your letter.

The smaller floppies - the 3.5 inch - replaced the larger 5.7 inch and were inside of plastic cases so you could actually travel with them and they would survive the journey; though even as late as the early nineties you could find those larger drives.

When hard-drives were invented, they became 'C' drives and the 'B' was phased out in the early nineties, so what you got was a computer with an 'A' drive which could take the smaller floppy, the larger ones no longer being made.

The floppy drive became the transportable storage facilities and sensible people would save on floppies as opposed to hard-drives so that they would have a way of 'filing' their work without filling up the hard-drive.

A 20 megabyte hard-drive seemed huge in ancient days, but as programmes became space gobblers, it was easy to fill the space so there were workers (I am not making this up), who would tell their boss that they needed a new computer as this one was 'full'.

But 99 per cent of the stuff could have been deleted if the so-called data entry clerk knew how.

By the late nineties, the CD-ROM was how operating systems and larger programmes were stored, and by the year 2000, the idea of burning CDs, as opposed to saving to floppies, was seen as the way to go.

In 2003, computers are being sold without floppy drives. The 'A' drive is joining the 'B' in the cyber cemetery.

The use of memory sticks, re-usable CDs (CD-RW) are pushing the stalwart 3.5 floppy into oblivion, which is a bit sad.

The 'A' drive is very useful. One can put all letters sent in a month or a particular document on a floppy, and then lay hand to the data as easily as pulling a file out of drawer.

One wonders if manufacturers are going to figure out what to do with 'A' and 'B' drives. USB attachments are at 'E'. The CD is called 'D.' What happens when there are two or more attachments?

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