Remember these? No, millennials, these are not drink coasters, but that’s about all they’re good for these days. 3.5″ floppy disks were commonplace in the late 1980s and early 90s. With a capacity up to 1.44 MB, it would take only 711 of them to equal a GB. New software would arrive on several numbered floppies. And up to four new fonts at a time on a single disk. Crazy, huh? And sharing our digital art files with printers on what we called a “transfer disk” was pretty amazing.
Ever heard of Bitstream? QuarkXPress? And imagine our excitement when we first downloaded Adobe Photoshop—version 2-POINT-O. Or when we took a digital tour of our brand-new Apple Macintosh SE/30 computer in 1990 (that’s the disk in the lower right). I guess it’s one of the reasons I’ve never gotten overly excited about buying new tech equipment or gadgets. It seems they’re almost as fleeting as the ephemera we design for our clients.
