Pass the nostalgia bag

I was at the university bookstore trying to decide whether to buy a 2Gb flash drive or blow another seven bucks for double the capacity, when suddenly I had an awful memory.

Five and a quarter inch floppies.

Unlike the three inch floppies that came later these things really did flop and were easy to bend and therefore break. The first computer I had ran on them, and I mean ran on them. You had to put in one with the operating system each time you turned the machine on.

But that wasn't the worst part. Each time you bought a new floppy you had to format it. That means you put it in the machine and the computer had to think about it before a minute or two before it could be used.

Ah, the good old days.

Using this website I just estimated that if I had a full 2Gb flash drive and for some insane reason I wanted to convert it all to five inch floppoes (and I could find an antique machine that had such a drive, it would take about 12,000 floppies. If I could format one a minute that would take more than a week, just to format. And boy, did we think those computers were great.

I like my flash drives.