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Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Zoe's Techno Rewind Again

Five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies?!  That's rich!  Tell me more!
Friends, I had so much fun on my first Techno Rewind and my follow-up Techno Rewind that I wanted to spend a little time today, laughing with you about what you used to consider high tech.

I'm mostly talking about Floppy Disks.  I was watching a television program the other day, set in the early days of the personal computer, and the people were using these flat square things called Floppy Disks.  There were some really big ones called Five-and-a-Quarter-Inch Floppies.  They were mostly black.  And they looked like hot pads to me.  Trivets.

But holy smokes, as I learned when I consulted my Little Big Board Book of Technological Advances of the Last Half-Century or So, you didn't wanna get caught using one of those five-and-a-quarters as a trivet.  Or a coaster. 

No, basically, you had to wear kid gloves and not let kids, whether they were wearing gloves or not, touch those five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks.  Apparently they were really fragile.  If they got degaussed, folded, crinkled, stepped on, thrown like a Frisbee, or looked at cross-eyed, you lost all your stuff on that disk.  All 1.44MB of stuff on that disk.  And it was a tuh-rage-edy!

The three-and-a-half-inch floppies that people like my parents remember having a bunch of when they were in college were more resilient, I understand, but can you imagine how EMBARRASSING it musta been to hafta go to college with a stash of 3.5-inch floppies?  It'd be like hauling out your cement-block-sized cellular telephone to make a call with.  And the 3.5-inch floppies weren't immune to falling victim to breakage or being used as a coaster.  Because those fellas sure look like coasters to me.

Big People, you've come a long way, technologically-speaking.  I'm really proud of you.  And also, I know I laugh at you a lot because of your crazy old-school technology, but I'm thankful you lived through those dark ages so that I will never hafta use a cellular telephone as big as a cement block.

I'll see ya tomorrow, Friends!  I love ya lots!  Muah!

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