One of my first (toy) websites was a silly floppy disk size calculator. You could enter an amount of songs/movies/files/etc and it would tell you how many disks it would take: https://howmanyfloppydisks.com/
It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.
> It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.
And yet the funny thing is, all the documents that are absolutely critical to my personal life would fit on a floppy no problem. That said I'd never have risked them to a floppy even when you could get them new. I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all.
I think my family's first computer had a 1GB hard drive in it (at most), now I can get an SD card with 1000 times that. It's amazing and truthfully I don't understand how it's possible.
> I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all.
I worked in a personnel office in the Army for a bit in the mid-90s, and they had a Windows machine with a bunch of documents and spreadsheets on the hard drive. The Staff Sergeant who ran the office was paranoid about losing everything in a hard drive failure, so the first thing he made me do was move all of them off to floppy disks. (I remember he called A: "the alpha drive" if that gives you any hint on his level of tech savviness.) Maybe the disks were old. Maybe it was the humidity. At any rate, it was only a couple of weeks before half that stuff was unreadable.
At the same time, I remember one time I crumpled up one of those 5.25 inch floppies in my TRS-80 programming class in high school, then I realized there was something I wanted off of it and flattened it back out - and it worked!
Ha. I often think about modern file and drive sizes in terms of how much space it would take up if in stacked 3.5 floppies. Like a block x feet high by y feet wide by z feet long.
I once wrote a program to actually do this for me when that was all I had to migrate files off my computer. But that was like 25 years ago so the files weren't so big.
BizarreByte|2 years ago
And yet the funny thing is, all the documents that are absolutely critical to my personal life would fit on a floppy no problem. That said I'd never have risked them to a floppy even when you could get them new. I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all.
I think my family's first computer had a 1GB hard drive in it (at most), now I can get an SD card with 1000 times that. It's amazing and truthfully I don't understand how it's possible.
13of40|2 years ago
I worked in a personnel office in the Army for a bit in the mid-90s, and they had a Windows machine with a bunch of documents and spreadsheets on the hard drive. The Staff Sergeant who ran the office was paranoid about losing everything in a hard drive failure, so the first thing he made me do was move all of them off to floppy disks. (I remember he called A: "the alpha drive" if that gives you any hint on his level of tech savviness.) Maybe the disks were old. Maybe it was the humidity. At any rate, it was only a couple of weeks before half that stuff was unreadable.
At the same time, I remember one time I crumpled up one of those 5.25 inch floppies in my TRS-80 programming class in high school, then I realized there was something I wanted off of it and flattened it back out - and it worked!
bombcar|2 years ago
tnias23|2 years ago
Mind blowing
z500|2 years ago