A well known phenomenon in computing is Moore's Law. Around 1970 Moore's Law first pointed to the trend that computing capabilities roughly doubled every two years. This principle continues to this day in processor speed and memory size.

Typically, the theory refers to harddrive size but we can also see a massive increase in the memory size of portable storage while the physical size shrinks.

Tell a typical 10 year old that they need to bring their homework in on a floppy disc and they'll probably ask you what a floppy disc is. But just 5 years ago they would have no trouble understanding (although they wouldn't have a clue what Facebook is). It goes to show how quickly a once essential part of a computer system can become obsolete.

Now that floppy discs are hard to come by, what are the modern alternatives? The portable magnetic disc was about to be replaced by the optical disc. The first and most obvious successor to the floppy was the CD. For a long time CDs were read only but in the 90s the first writable discs appeared on the market. Although CDs have been around since the 80s, it wasn't until the 2000s that they really started to replace floppy discs as the favoured media for transferring data. Although there were problems with incompatibility, the main benefit of CDs was obvious; they could hold around 500 floppy discs worth of data in a single disc.

The progression from CD was very straight forward. First DVD then Blu-Ray. The technology was very similar and to most people they look identical. The only difference was with the data capacities. DVD could hold around 5 times what a CD could manage, and Blu-Ray, in turn could also contain 5 DVDs' worth of data.

However the optical disc wasn't the only option for transporting data. Since 2005, USB flash drives have become a very common media for data.

One advantage they have over optical discs is that they don't need to have data burned to them in a permanent state. Rewriting data is much more simple thanks to the way flash memory works. This means it is possible to work directly on files held on the USB flash drive. In contrast, an optical disc would require you to save a file locally then burn it to the disc each time you wanted to save.

Flash drives would be even more prevalent today if it wasn't for one of the biggest innovations in history; the Internet. The rapid growth of the Internet means many devices, especially computers and mobile phones are able to receive files remotely from just about anywhere in the world (and even beyond).

The Internet has many advantages over portable media, above all the freedom to transfer data without physically going to the source. However it is held back by having relatively slow transfer speeds in comparison with the likes of a USB flash drive.

It looks like the Internet will be the future of data transfer to an even greater degree than it already is. For the time being though, USB flash drives, DVDs and Blu-Ray will still play a large part in our computing.