A Blast From the Past

A couple of weeks ago, New Moonies teamed up and gave the New Moon basement a good cleaning. We went through old boxes and recycled a lot of paper and old computer parts! While I was going through a box, I found three 5 ¼ inch floppy disks. I hadn’t seen 5 ¼ floppies since I was really little. I was excited to see them because it brought back memories of my very first computer.

Chances are, some of you have never seen or used a 5 ¼ floppy disk! It’s amazing to me how quickly technology changes and becomes outdated. Here is a brief history of the 5 ¼ floppy disk from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

The first 5 ¼ floppy was introduced in the 1976 to replace the larger and more cumbersome 8 inch disk. By the end of the 1980s, the smaller 3 ½ floppy disks took over. By the mid 1990s,5 ¼ disks and drives disappeared from the market. At the end of its life, the 5 ¼ floppy was able to hold 1.2 MB of information. The 3 ½ disk that replaced it, held 1.4 MB.

5 ¼ compared to 3 ½

The storage capacity is a hard idea for me to grasp, but this “visual” helped.

A CD-RW, that I found in our office, holds 700 MB of information! That means if the CD was holding all the information it could, it would take 584 5 ¼ floppies OR 500 3 ½ floppies to hold the same amount of information as the CD. WOW, have times changed! Can you imaging going to school with 584 disks in your back pack?

If you are interested in taking a trip into the past, check out this site. http://oldcomputers.net/ It is dedicated to vintage computers! Just think the computer you’re using right now might be on this site in 20 years!! ;)