Things are pretty fantastic today as far as storage is concerned but there was a time that it wasn't so easy and fast. For people that were born in the late 90's or beyond, things have always been pretty fast as far as they were concerned but there was a time when it wasn't so great.
When I say it wasn't so great you need to understand that we didn't know any different so we didn't really complain. There wasn't anything else to really compare it to and computers in the 80's had very limited use. The first time I remember using computers at all was when I was in 8th grade and we had these monstrous computers that only had green and black screens and we used them for typing class. There was a tiny bit of programming put in there but mostly they were preparing us for being secretaries.
These things were monsters and they were extremely tough. The keyboards required you to press pretty hard and they were loud unlike today's computers where someone can be typing away and it is almost totally silent. Back in my typing class you could take a hammer to the keyboards and probably not damage it. The monitors were attached to the keyboards and it would take 2 or more full sized men in order to move one of them. There was no such thing as a laptop.
Later in life computers were still not used as any sort of major part of my schooling. I didn't type a single paper for school until I was in college. This was around 1994. Prior to that everything would be done on paper and for some reason, it had to be in pen which was annoying since pencil can be erased but pen can not. I don't know why they were so insistent on this for all classes other than math-oriented ones.
Anyway, getting back to the point. When gaming became a part of my life it was a pretty time-consuming experience. There was no internet so you had to buy physical copies of anything you wanted and it would arrive on sometimes a rather crazy amount of disks because the maximum storage of a floppy was close to 1.5 Megabytes. A single photograph on your phone's camera is likely larger than this.
Installing a new OS was a very time-consuming operation as well and it involved you actually understanding something about DOS and also the BIOS. I understand these things today but that was because I grew up with it. These days I would be willing to bet that most users don't even know what either of those acronyms stand for let alone how to use them. I'm sure that if you are a gamer that you have experienced that modern games are absolutely huge. If we were to take a modern game like Red Dead Redemption 2 and put it on floppy disks more than 22,000 of them would be necessary. Also, there was probably almost zero chance that any computer had a hard disk large enough to install something like that on it.
Later in life, CD's were introduced and they were a huge game-changer, but since we were still working out the details on how to re-write to them at the time, they were not a very good method of reusable storage. I was a Computer Science major for a while and this was unacceptable, so we had to get involved with Zip Drives, which at the time at least, were amazing.
These things were amazing and the upsides were that they held 100 MB of data (they would later hold up to 250) and while this seems stupid compared to today's micro-SD's that are size of your fingernail and hold 64GB, it was a very big deal at the time.
The only real problem was that almost nobody had these drives so unless you were using it just for your own computer, there was a very good chance that you wouldn't be able to share this data with anyone else. Thankfully the USB versions of these drives were lightweight, robust, and easily transported. They were also for the most part plug and play meaning that you didn't need any drivers for them to function. This was a mere blip in the marketplace though as CD's and later DVD re-writable disks became the industry standard and the technology was a lot more widespread and inexpensive. I preferred Zip drives because they were faster and basically indestructible, but the hardware was relatively expensive at what would be around $350 in today's money. The disks were also $20 each so it made sense to most people to use DVD-R technology which was much much cheaper.
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you could get a pack of 50 of these bad boys for the price of one, 100MB zip drive disk
I don't know what caused the fallout of CD's and DVD's but i reckon it was a number of factors as lack of durability, data loss due to poorly manufactured and cheap disks, and also the advent of much easier to use and faster USB drives the likes of which many people still use today. The last 2 computers I purchased didn't come with any sort of drives other than USB. Hell, USB drives are becoming obsolete as it isn't really necessary to physically transfer any data for the most part: Everything has been transitioned to cloud storage it seems.
There was a time though, and I lived through all of them, that we were very limited in storage and while today's standards certainly are better, I'm glad I lived through all the various phases of it. Being in college and truly interested in computing in the 90's was a really exciting time to be alive because things were changing so much.
I wonder what the future will hold because for each of the above advancements we thought "it can't get any better than this." What will come next?