Memory was very limited back in the early PC days, along with storage. MS-DOS could support a maximum of 640k RAM. In many cases that meant coding in assembler, and if the program became large, considering a strategy of swapping parts of it into and out of RAM as required.
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My collection of 5.25" floppies is long gone, but I still have a few 3.5" disks, along with a box of 8-inchers, and no use for either type.
Up until about 5 years ago I was part of a team that maintained a building automation system that dated to the 1990s. Were talking floppy drives, RS-232 ports, and MS-DOS/Win 3.1 here. As the client’s own supply of 3.5" disks dwindled, many of my own disks were pressed into service to keep that crawling horror alive.
Updating the system would have been too expensive for the bean counters to tolerate. It was much cheaper from fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter to pay us to doctor the system as needed.
As the resident old computer guy, that job fell largely on my shoulders. Hey, it was job security for several years.
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Mavica? You need my contribution to netpbm 411toppm User Manual
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I think the last Borland C++ distro on floppies was ~25 floppies. It seemed huge, but that was less than 40M of zipped files.
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… so we can keep them with our vinyl records?
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I grew up using floppy discs (mostly the hard plastic ones, but I used the actually-floppy kind at school for a time), but I don’t really miss them. They had a satisfying look and feel but were always inadequately small. I could never fit enough of my own stuff on them, and it was a pain having to swap them out multiple times whenever I needed to install something. CDs seemed amazing and futuristic for a while but soon felt the same way as technology progressed, plus the annoyance of only being able to hold them by the edges. I’m pretty happy not having to deal with any discs at this point and just having everything on internal hard drives where it’s instantly accessible.
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I still have TRS-80 cassettes in the basement. I doubt they work, but I don’t have a working tape recorder cassette drive with which to try them.
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… in retrospect the best thing about writable CD’s was probably the opportunity to design our own Sharpie cover art for them
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Also applies to the “CD-R insert” aesthetic.
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My dissertation exists only at the university library and on my 3.5” floppies. The contract company I paid to get me a bound hardcover screwed me and never delivered. I expect the disks are likely degraded but I keep them to remember my pain.
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and here i am now trying to imagine how you can fit a floppy into any kind of probe or eprom. maybe a tardis kind of thing. bigger on the inside? 
that image makes me think it’d be cool to have a business card that was a punch card. but how would anyone even know what it is or how to read it?
( and anyway, i guess business cards seem about as outdated as the floppy )
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I am amused by the fact that sometimes we still refer to video as “footage” as if we were still exposing feet of film. But then we still “fire” guns even though we are not putting a burning match to the touch hole.
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Mid-90s, I had to install a paper-tape reader to a PC-based CNC drilling machine. My customer refused to move from his carefully curated paper tape collection. Actually mostly on mylar for longevity.
He had a small room with lovely wooden cases with thin drawers, in which were stored all the company’s NC part programs, each in its own film case. Climate-controller room of course.
Couldn’t convince him to move to floppy. My company even offered to do all the conversion from tape to floppy. All those programs could be stored on a single 3.5" floppy, ffs!
Nope. Tape forever. So I learned how to interface a tape reader/puncher to an MS-DOS PC. Lucky it’s trivial, being RS-232C and all. 9600baud, 8-N-1, wrote a bit of BASIC to do the input & output.
Yesterday I cloned my 1TB C: to a 2TB SSD. We’ve come a long way.
ETA: my wife worked for an airplane upgrading company (take plain business jets or small commercial aircraft, pull out the innards, replace with customized interiors…); no less than 5 years ago they still had to deal with in-flight entertainment systems that needed floppy disks.
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Nice rack. [wolf-whistle sound effect]
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For a (brief) time you could get business cards that were rectangular-ish mini CD-ROMs.
Not a bad idea as such; convenient form factor and information like your company’s catalogue or whatever delivered, say to a potential customer at a trade show.
Made obsolete in no time by those newfangled cat-pipes, of course.
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