wow, now that is a nice find. i haven't seen them for a long time.

I take it to be a 5.25" IBM DOS. Maybe circa 1986 or slightly later. (I think all PC's went 3.5" by 1990 with a 5.25" option.) Looks more like the Double Density variety. The half label said something 'DRU'. (Wow. The camera really washed out that label. I was thinking that I would have to blur the words. But...not necessary.) So, my word smith sleuthing is thinking this may have been some kind of data disk for a drug store. (There was also part of an address. But, I can't read any of that in the image.) Makes me really curious how a 30 (plus or minus) year old piece of tech storage wound up on the street. Maybe it was in some old file storage that finally got cleaned out. Or, wouldn't it be both shocking and amazing if that disk had somehow remained active an an ancient PC that was still handling records, until really recently. Cut in half makes me ponder if inside that magnetic surface, still lay some rather personal data records with who knows what. Even if it had been whole, I wouldn't have had any way of reading it since a quarter of a century, ago.

How far we have come. That thing once held dozens and dozens of kilobytes. And the music player I had with me with a card that could be stored inside a tricked out dime can hold 32 gigs of data. Makes me wonder if in another 30 years, if everyone will just not care what the storage size is on the Cloud or if we'll all never have moved on from Crystal Discs. (What are those suppose to be? 360 TB of reliable, permanent storage? Talking Superman's data storage system on that one.)

yep kilobytes were the thing, now its terabytes, its insane how fast technology has come. yet you can still find companies still making cd playrs, cassette players and even some sweet vinyl record players for 33's and 45's. i have used those black 5.25 and 3.5 floppies before. they worked. and can still find new players like on newegg,

There are people that do swear how the vinyl sounds the best...even with the pops and such. Plus, those scratch DJ's love to play vinyl in both directions and at crazy speeds. There's even a store near me with an LP section. Granted, quite small. But, it exists.

My ride still has a tape deck. So, there's some kind of cassette market still out there. But, I don't mind going MP3. Always felt the physical media was far too fragile. (I mean CD's will drop and scratch, cassettes will be eaten and go all over the place like spaghetti, VHS will degrade if a dirty head doesn't rip it to pieces.)

In storage, I actually have a hybrid. It's a CD player that plays MP3 files from a disc. I wouldn't even think of using such a thing, today. Not with these micro players from China that cost a dollar-ninety-eight.

i got some LP's nothing like having physical music and artwork. yeah there is a music shop here that have a small Lp section too.just a niche genre now.

my last vehicle 2000 ford ranger had a cd and cassette player in it, and the consol had slots for a couple cassettes.

I knew of a very out of the way place in Southern California that had an impressive lot of vinyl. Just an out of the way place on an outdated highway in a two pump town. Sold literal junk and had this storage shed with tons of albums. Just a broken down place, connected to a restaurant that tries to grab attention from the nearby freeway (You'd have to make an effort to back track to reach.) in a town that's more a name on a map then an identifiable town named Rainbow.

The big one.

Actually, the big one would be the 8 inch version. http://floppydisk.com/images/8inch.jpg

I've never even seen one of those. But, I seem to remember that they stored even less.

There's a good comparison image. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe.....components.jpg

Damn!

Still, those were revolutionary to the punch cards that I've only heard about in history books.

The closest thing I've ever come to handling punch cards would have been this odd device that Nintendo made for one of their Game Boy units. While an amazing to behold that this series of dots on a stripe could translate into a game, it was a process, to state the least being...pure anguish. (However, if the unit only had a larger capacity for storage, it would have been a fantastic way to do budget gaming in those pre-internet days. For, I must imagine printed cards were cheaper then physical cartridges. Instead, it only held one first gen NES title at a time. Which made it very hard to want to change titles.)