I was cleaning out the closets this weekend and found an antique. It’s an IBM 8″ Diskette, capable of storing one megabyte of data. It’s 23 years old. By comparison to today’s standards, what’s amazing is that it was good for anything other than a drink coaster. My cell phone has 16,000 times as much storage capacity.
And the external disk drive I used to store all my pictures and music on? The one I just replaced because it’s two years old and I can get one twice as large now for $100? That crappy old thing can store 500,000 times as much data, and unlike the 8″ floppy, will fit in my back pocket.
Let’s look at it another way: if I had to store the entire contents of my retired external disk drive onto 8″ floppy disks, I would need 500,000 of them, or a stack of floppies nearly one mile high and costing around $3,500,000 (in 1987 dollars). Better yet, if I were to print out the entire contents of my external disk drive onto double-spaced 8-1/2″ x 11″ paper, I would have a book which stands over sixteen miles high. Good luck finding a publisher.
Yes, technology has really come a long way. Of course, with all that data, I have a hard time finding anything, but it’s good to know it’s there if I need it. Whatever it is.
P.S. If you work for IBM and are reading this, I promise I did not steal, copy, read, mutilate, or otherwise in any infringe on the licensed information contained on your 8″ Diskette. I swear.