"Residual media," an interesting term of art.
https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:27176/datastreams/CONTENT/content
“POOR BLACK SQUARES”:
AFTERIMAGES OF THE FLOPPY DISK
by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
University of Maryland
Residual Media
It was an obscure government report, but it contained a tidbit that went viral immediately: in May,
2016, a white paper released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office on the need for federal
agencies to address aging legacy systems noted (more or less in passing) that elements of the nuclear command and control system for Minuteman missiles still relied on a forty-year-old IBM Series/1 computer serviced by 8-inch floppy disks.
“Introduced in the 1970s,” the author explained, “the 8- inch floppy disk is a disk-based storage medium that holds 80 kilobytes of data. In comparison, a single modern flash drive can contain the equivalent of more than 3.2 million floppy disks.” The report also included a helpful illustration depicting one of the matte black square-shaped disks with a donut hole in the middle alongside its paper slip case.
The Internet loved it. The juxtaposition of floppy (floppy!) disks with nuclear-tipped ICBMs
seemed to encompass everything that was absurd about both government bureaucracy and Cold War
strategic thinking—WarGames (1983), Dr. Strangelove (1964), and Brazil (1985), all at once. It was
left to the Washington Post to explain that the military logic (such as it was) was that the IBM Series/1 was isolated from any networked threat and the air-gap bridged by floppies was a security feature, not a bug. (The Post also reported that the system was due to be overhauled and replaced in 2017.)
Regardless, the entertainment value of this news item—feeding the Internet’s insatiable appetite for irony and oddity—underscores the extent to which the floppy disk has lodged itself in the memory of a generation weaned on the totems and paraphernalia of early home computing. It also suggests other contradictions worth our notice: that floppies are self-evidently obsolete but still stubbornly useful and useable, much like a typewriter or landline telephone in certain circumstances; that they are ancient and obscure technology—such that the GAO report’s author felt obliged to explain the mostbasic facts about them—but yet everyone devouring the story online knew exactly what a floppy disk was, and so the delighted (if slightly queasy) reaction.
The floppy disk is thus an exemplar of what Charles R. Acland and others, after Raymond
Williams, have asked us to call residual media, a formulation they employ as an alternative to the
relentless presentism of so-called “new” media. Residual media, by contrast, reveal the persistent
medial continuities between and across different historical moments, and they trouble our standard
progressive narratives of technological advancement.4 My locution of the afterimage in the title of
this essay is meant to evoke this same lingering quality, but it has two additional valences as well: the first is to account for the iconography of the floppy in popular visual culture; the second is to direct us to a specific set of technical preservation practices for floppy disks, a topic which this essay treats in some detail....
