CP/M is a disk operating system. It relies on one or more “disks” for permanent storage, which persists while the computer is off. At the time, 8” floppy drives had just started to become available, at “affordable” prices (under a thousand US dollars).
The actual media, i.e. the floppies inserted into these drives, were very crude and easily damaged. Not only that, but an 8” single-sided single-density (SSSD) disk could hold only a small amount of data: 77 tracks with 26 sectors each, containing 128 bytes of “payload”.
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