A Look at the Short-Lived 3-Inch Compact Floppy Disk

Byte Cellar ^ | 25FEB19 | Blake Patterson

[Still Thinking]

I knew a guy who used 1-2-3 for EVERYTHING. Everything. He’d even type letters in it.

[zeugma]

Recently saw a dated picture of an IBM storage unit with 5 megabytes capacity on a forklift being delivered. Cost unknown but for perspective one picture on your phone or one song would max it out.

Was it this?

One interesting statistic about data sizes, IMO is the fact that the Bible is just about 5 MB of ASCII text uncompressed. It makes the amount of data you are talking about something that is more easy to relate to.

[beef]

This is the first I heard of it and I have been involved with pwesonal computing since the 70’s. I used to have a “proto laptop”, Zenith I think, that took little tiny floppies, like 2 inch or something. Sold them for decent $$ on ebay.

Looking back on it, floppies were pretty lousy. Low capacity, prone to failure. But it was all we had, so we put up with them.

[Tunehead54]

Belated thanks for tracking that photo down. I think the one I saw was actually street level going into the building but dimensions, era and capacity seem right.

While the Bible comparison is apt for storage, my comparison of a single MP3 or a single cell phone photo completely using up that 5MB was meant to be relative to anyone with a phone.

If we go out for a beach walk or a sunset I don’t think anything of taking 20 pictures or having 500 MP3s on my phone. Just saying. Thanks again for the pic.

;-)