We all have memories of the tech we grew up with, and the 70s to 90s were witness to a groundbreaking transformation from the analogue, to the digital age. It’s hard to imagine just how ubiquitous the floppy disc was, especially in plastic clad 3.5″ form, and how much competition there was for its successor. It all seems so quaint today, when you can store a 500,000 times as much information on something as small as a fingernail, so why do we miss those times so much?

The first in a new series called Techstalgic, it aims to look, as the name suggests, at all the old tech we looked back on fondly, even through in reality, they sucked. The 3.5″ floppy burned brightly for a decade, but became completely unable to keep pace with growing data demands, with even the simplest of software packages requiring multiple discs. Now, even Blu-ray’s are in the same position, such is progress, and my small server has a storage capacity some 50 million times greater.