Everyday items that are disappearing... or already gone
My first computer was something called a Commodore 64. I still remember the big discs we used to save files. They had to be kept away from heat and magnets, and they could be easily damaged. But discs got a lot smaller and better since then.
The first “floppy discs,” as the saving devices were called, were eight inches square and stored an underwhelming 80 KB of data (meaning it couldn’t have even held one song stored as an .mp3 file). By the mid-1980s, floppies had decreased to three and a half inches and could store up to 1.44 MB (so maybe a song or two). Also, they were no longer “floppy,” but protected by a rigid plastic case. The name stuck anyway.
Then CD-ROMs began to take over, followed by USBs, around the year 2000. The first PC without a floppy drive came out in 1998. Sony, the last manufacturer of floppies, finally ceased their production in 2011. And today the floppy disc is just known as the “save” symbol on your computer. Now you know where that came from!
When we needed to learn something in school that couldn’t just be written in chalk on a blackboard, our teachers used overhead projectors. Projectors were also used in businesses and at events. A white screen would be set up in the front of the classroom, and the projector (sitting on a little cart) would be wheeled in. Transparent sheets of plastic printed with images were placed on the device, which then projected the images onto the screen so everyone could see them.
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