The floppy drive, an old school memory device, may itself may have fallen out of modern memory. This video by "The 8-Bit Guy," a computer savant and YouTube personality, gives us a refresher on how it actually worked.The magnetic material of the floppy disk, stored inside a plastic square shell, was used for data storage. While it was impossible to see the actual data on the disk, if it were visible it would have looked something like the round circular ridges that appear on a vinyl record. The typical floppy disk had about 40 tracks.The data itself was stored in usually eight sectors on the disk. This made it so that a track on the outside rings of the disk would be larger than a track on the inside rings, yet both were supposed to hold the same amount of information. To work around this disparity and make the most efficient use of the disk space, different companies engineered various versions of the floppy—also making it harder or impossible at times for different brand computers and floppy drives to work together.The floppy disk may seem like a vintage artifact, but this video reminds us that the United States military actually still uses old floppy disks in some of its "specialized" computers for controlling things like nuclear missiles.While floppy disks were fairly expensive in the eighties and early nineties, the price—along with the quality—had come down tremendously until production ceased in the late 2000s. You can still buy them online on sites like Amazon or floppydisk.com ($9.95 for a ten-pack).Floppies pushing 30 to 35 years old can still be reliable, the video says—others, perhaps not so much, requiring a floppy drive emulator to run. Nonetheless, as the video points out, there is something "comforting and nostalgic," about hearing the click and grind of a floppy inserted into the computer.