A diskette (also called a floppy disk) was a thin, square piece of plastic used to store computer files before USB drives and cloud storage existed. The most common diskettes were 3.5 inches across and could hold about 1.4 megabytes of data: that's roughly 500 pages of text, or maybe one or two low-resolution photos by today's standards.

Diskettes had a hard plastic shell protecting a magnetic disk inside that spun when inserted into a computer's disk drive. You could save your schoolwork, games, or pictures onto a diskette and carry it to another computer. In the 1980s and 1990s, nearly every computer had a diskette drive, and people relied on these disks the way you might use a USB drive today.

By the early 2000s, diskettes became obsolete because they couldn't hold much data compared to newer storage options. A single modern photo from a phone would be too large to fit on one. But you might still recognize the diskette's image: many computer programs still use a picture of a diskette as their “save” icon, even though most kids today have never actually seen one. It's a little piece of computing history that lives on as a symbol.