Technically I am 15 minutes late on this Throwback Thursday but bear with me it’s been a crazy week.
Currently at work (ugh I know I can’t just blog all day, haha) we are putting together a sales center for a new development. I won’t get into details but as we were meeting with an interior designer about the space, the head of my company, who is in his fifties, suggested a design detail that included the use of floppy disks. Some of you reading this might have just said in your head, “What the hell is a floppy disk?”
Well kids, there was a time, frankly not that long ago, that you couldn’t fit a million songs / files on your tiny USB drive or iPod and fit it into your pocket. Back in the days of the first personal computers they had these things called floppy disks (see below) and that’s how you stored your important files.
These disks were inserted directly into your computer, which you couldn’t even do anymore unless you buy an floppy disk external drives (didn’t know they had those until now). In school for important projects you were given old, written over, floppy disks to use in the computer lab (don’t know what that is, yeah well that’s a topic for another Throwback Thursday) and had to hope that no harm came to it. I mean these weren’t exactly break proof and they data on them was easily erased. Plus I think the highest amount of storage one of these bad boys held was like 240MB whereas the iPhone 5 can hold up to 64GB.
The originals were big and “floppy” hence the name, but eventually like all good technology it got smaller and more efficient. I can distinctly remember getting like 2 files on each floppy, carefully labeling them and putting them in a rolodex (some of you probably don’t know what that is either) type case. Even thru college these were being used until thankfully someone came out with a better system.
Here’s a look at some other “computer data storage systems” throughout history.
http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/08/the-history-of-computer-data-storage-in-pictures/
Speaking of floppy disks when I was doing some spring cleaning I came across a Verbatim disk from my college days, and what’s sad is that I can’t even check what’s on it anymore…I feel old.
Do you have a lot of floppy disks lying around and have no idea what to do with them? Check out these fun website with some crafting ideas.
We Date Nerds 