I was copying some shows to a thumb drive for my son to watch on a very old laptop that we just use as a video player for the kids. While waiting for them to copy over, my eyes fell on the capacity label on the thumb drive. 128 GB.

When I was the same age as my son, 5¼ floppies were the tool of the land. If you know what a floppy disk is, when you think floppy disks you probably think high capacity 1.44 MB because that (in the form of 3½ floppies) was the standard for a long time, the late 80s and pretty much all of the 90s, but 5¼ disks never made that high capacity leap. During the x386/486 eras they got to a max size of 1.2 MB. But when I was my son's age, I was using my Commodore 64. The 5¼ disks for the C64 were 170 KB per side, for a max of 340 if you used both sides, but they were often only single-sided, leaving us with that tiny 170 KB to play with.

I remember I had one of those disk file cases (similar to the photo below) with all my games. In those days, almost everyone pirated. We didn't consider it pirating, and as computers were still mostly a hobby thing, companies didn't even make much of an effort to discourage the practice. Most of my disks had several games on each one. Think early games—well, C64 ports of early games—like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Ghosts 'n Goblins, and so on. Games of that era. That tells you how tiny these games were that I could fit several of them on a 170 KB disk.

170KB is such a small amount. Most of us probably have spreadsheet files larger than that. Doing the math, it would take 789,516 of these old C64 disks to equal this 128 GB thumb drive that I am using for my kids' videos.

I probably do still have some 5¼ disks packed up at my parent's house, but I don't have any here with me in Japan. But here is a photo from Wikipedia that offers a bit of a size comparison

^{via Wikipedia}

What's funny about that photo is the disk labels and sleeves all say "Mini-floppy disk". They were considered mini because the standard floppy size when they came around was 8 inch. That one predates me, but my university computer science department had many of them on display so I could see them up close. Continuing the name, when introduced, the 3½ floppies were called "micro-floppy disks".

^{8-inch, 5¼, and 3½ floppies - via Wikipedia}

Anyway, 789,516. That's a lot.

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.