Hacker News

Having grown up with them, to me floppies still feel like something special, unlike later more capacious media. The fact that a floppy’s storage is so limited provides an upper bound to the complexity of dealing with it: one physical object represents one (or a small set of) digital document(s); my mind intuitively understands this fact. Whereas a multi-megabyte USB stick or multi-gigabyte cloud drive sure is more convenient but less simple, requiring me to rely on metaphor instead of physicality.

This to me is the main draw of retrocomputing: it originates from a time when computing was too simple to provide much in the way of learned metaphors, instead having to rely on intuitive physicality. Maybe that’s something we’ve lost along the way.