Skip to main content

From Floppy Disk to Superhuman Robot

 

Floppy Disks

Japan was probably the only country that retained the floppy disk on their computers so long. Now that country has decided to say goodbye to the floppy drive and the disk.

Most people of the present young generation may not even have seen the floppy disk. When I bought my first computer, a desktop that took up quite a lot of space in the room, the floppy disk was the only way to copy data and store it or transfer it. The disk couldn’t keep much data either. I remember using floppy disks that could contain hardly 1.44 MB of data. Very often these disks would get infected either by virus or by the weather. It couldn’t withstand humidity or the heat of Delhi’s summer. It was absolutely unreliable, in short.

Soon came compact disks or CDs which were far superior to the floppy disks. But copying anything on to the CD was a Herculean task which I never managed to master. It had the tremendous (tremendous in those days) capacity to hold 700 MB of data.

When I got my first pen drive, I was quite excited. It could hold one full GB of data and using it was mere child’s play. I still remember the astounding amount of Rs1200 I paid for that small stick. It was a novelty in those days, a wonder, in fact.  

My present laptop, a Lenovo IdeaPad, doesn’t even have a CD drive. I was told that CDs had become as extinct as the floppies, when I purchased this laptop. But now I’m given to understand that the CD is all set to return in a new avatar with a storage capacity of 1.6 petabytes. [A petabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes!] How far have I come from the 20 GB storage space of my first PC to petabytes!

The changes that occurred in this one field alone, during a short part of my lifespan, make me wonder about the human potential for creating magic and miracles. I’m sure a lot more changes are in the offing, much more than I can even imagine.

What’s my dream for my tomorrow? To have a robot to do all the unpleasant tasks at home like weeding the garden and cleaning the house. I’m quite sure that will be a reality soon enough.



Top post on Blogchatter

Comments

  1. magiceyeJuly 8, 2024 at 7:17 PM

    Evolution! There already is a robot available in India to clean the floor!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 8, 2024 at 7:47 PM

      Yeah, i saw that even on Amazon. I'm waiting for one that will do a lot more :)

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanJuly 8, 2024 at 8:24 PM

    Hari OM
    My first career path was in computing - begun when there were still punch cards for input, tapes for storage, and room-sized operational units! I kid not. The changes, particularly this century, are awe-inspiring, but, with the approach (encroachment?) of AI, I find myself becoming a bit troglodyte! Be careful what is wished for, is my thinking on this. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pradeep NairJuly 8, 2024 at 11:17 PM

    This trip down memory lane with storage devices is fascinating! I remember the struggle of floppy disks too... They were so ultramodern then! ... Who knows, maybe your robot gardener will be a reality even sooner than you think!
    (My latest post: UK Tour 06 - Beamish Museum)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 9, 2024 at 7:26 PM

      Indeed, back then, the floppy disk was a miracle.

      Delete
  4. Liz A.July 9, 2024 at 3:54 AM

    There's a "law" in computing about doubling the amount of storage (or power or something) every 18 months. It's seemed to hold true, and the amount of data and storage is just mind blowing.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Cindy D'SilvaJuly 10, 2024 at 3:07 AM

    Lovely post. Just the other day I was trying to explain to my daughter what a floppy disk was. I still have my diary on them. Still have them. Don't know why.

    Lost a lot of data that I had stored on HDs. Gosh so heartbreaking. But it is man made after all. Memory in our brain is best.

    Even I want a robot to do all the housework and cooking.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 10, 2024 at 1:38 PM

      I sent my first book on English poetry in a floppy disk to my publisher. Now books are far easier to be sent and published. Life is much better today with all the technology. The robot will be ready too soon. But will we be any happier?

      Delete
  6. Lux G.July 10, 2024 at 7:18 PM

    Oh, my goodness. This brings a lot of memories. Good and bad. lol! Oh, how far we've gone.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

Modi’s Art of Censorship

One of the infinite ironies about Narendra Modi’s India is its flagrant censorship while claiming to be the most tolerant civilisation. A Guardian report today informs us that Arundhati Roy’s 2020 book, Azadi , is banned in Kashmir for promoting a “false narrative and secessionism.” Being a fan of Ms Roy’s rebellious spirit, I buy her books as they are published. I had reviewed this book ( Azadi ) back in 2020 when it was published. The Congress government that ruled India for a very long period, before Modi’s rhetoric mesmerised the Indian electorate, was highly flawed. Corruption ran in its every single vein. Yet it was far better than what Modi brought in its place. The glaring hypocrisy of the Congress was a glue that held India together, Ms Roy says in this censored book of hers. What she means to say is that though secularism was not practised sincerely or consistently the pretence of it acted as a binding force that maintained a kind of social and political equilibrium. T...
9 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Solzhenitsyn’s Many Disillusionments

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died a sad and disillusioned man. Solzhenitsyn was a genuine socialist in the beginning. He fought for the Red Army in WWII. He was a committed Soviet patriot. Equality, justice, and dignity of the workers were his ideals, his dreams. However, Stalin became a brutal dictator and Solzhenitsyn became his vocal critic. As a result, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sent to the Gulag: a network of inhuman labour camps. Hundreds of Russians were tortured and killed in those camps and Solzhenitsyn was disillusioned with socialism. The Russian Revolution was supposed to have liberated the common citizens from imperial oppressions. However, the new government under Stalin was far more ruthless, unjust, and oppressive than the empire. The socialist ideology became a kind of deity for which everything else was sacrificed, including truth. Writing the story of his life in the camp in The Gulag Archipelago , Solzhenitsyn warned that such systems coul...
9 comments
Read more