Some of you may remember the “old school” time of computers. I got to thinking about those times and how computers, more notably storage, have changed over the last 20 years or so. Technology improves by leaps and bounds each time something new comes out, making the previous top of the line device look like something out of a cave man’s out house. Let’s see how many of you guys remember these devices. remember how, when they were released, they were the sweetest, fastest, geekiest things and you were proud to show them off to freinds and family?

The 8 track tape: I remember these for a short time in my childhood. My father had several in his car, all country music. The device saw some success. It had eight tracks across one strip of tape inside. The tape was on an endless loop, spooling from the center and returning to the outside, and after the tape made a full revolution, the playhead was moved to the next strip. Because of the moving parts and shoddy manufacturing, it soon lost out to the cassette tape.

The Cassette Tape: Tape recorders were cheap and plentiful, as were the cassettes they used. In practice, though, the analog nature of the format meant that performance was poor. I get impatient when Paint Shop Pro takes more than a few seconds to load. With these devices, you could be waiting for 10 minutes or more and you were just as likely to see “R Tape Loading Error” as you were the splash screen of the program you were opening.

The Zip Drive: A floppy on acid. Instead of a lame one megabyte (1.44 if you’re counting), the Zip Disk topped out at 750 MB by the end of its life. Replaced by rewrittable CDs and the fact that, with the exception of memory cards, almost nothing requires a special read/write device. I had several of these, and still do somewhere in my box of old and outdated technology I keep in the closet.