Flashback Friday: Floppy Disks

Technology has come a long way since its inception. Every Friday, let's take a look back at some of the most interesting facts about technology and its evolution over the years and dub it "Flashback Friday". From the first computers to the latest AI-powered gadgets, Technology Flashback Friday will take you on an amazing journey through time!

This week we will start with one of the more iconic staples in technological history, the 3.5" floppy disk. Just to put into perspective how far we have come in size, the 3.5" floppy was respectively 3.5" square that was just about 1/8" thin compared to the USB drive that is often referred to as a "thumb drive" being that it is just about the size of a thumb.

It's not only the general size that has changed, but the significant uptick in space on the storage medium itself. We will use MB or "Megabyte" as the marker for how much data you can actually fit on each. A floppy disk can hold 1.44MB at the peak of it's storage in 1986. Move to today when thinking about an 8GB or "Gigabyte" USB storage drive it can fit 8192MB. That's OVER 5600x the capacity alone, not to mention the read/write or usable speed of the device. Quite an upgrade! Not only that, but USB drives can come in sizes up to 1TB or "Terabyte"(1024GB) which is 128x the size of that 8GB USB device and over 1,000,000x the size of the floppy disk. They have come a LONG way in 30 years.

Handy breakdown of MB, GB, and TB
1024KB = 1MB
1024MB = 1GB
1024GB = 1TB