National Technology Day on January 6th recognizes how technology changes the world and looks to the future of technology. As usual I seem to spend more time looking to the past. After yesterday’s post about old-time computer stuff from the 1980’s another memory popped up and I wanted to continue the thread for National Technology Day. How many of you kids recognize this:

Ah, the old Floppy Disk. Between work and home I had more than a thousand of these. They eventually went out of use because as computer power grew they could not handle the expanding need for storage. In the late 1980’s I was working for a theatre road house run by a college in Davie, Florida. Slow to change they were running VisiCalc (which had already been absorbed by Lotus 1-2-3) for their spreadsheets for payroll sheets and budget reporting. I got a sneak peak at this new odd program called Microsoft Excel but the college wouldn’t install it until mach later.

I acquired an early version and had two floppy disks. Each time I needed to load a spreadsheet I had to install a sample local Windows program and then the Excel Program. Even with that slow start it was faster and easier to work that darn VisiCalc. I use Excel now for nearly everything. Eventually they ended up shutting down Even that Lotus 1-2-3. For a long time I kept those disks as a souvenir but not sure if the made the move to Florida. Oh well, wouldn’t be useful any more, no one uses floppy disks any longer.