1.44 MB

Nostalgia can strike anytime. It is funny how some place or object can open up a memory that you would not have thought of for many months or years even. Some small things give you a blast from the past and it is not necessary that the memory is accompanied by the sadness associated with Nostalgia.

Yesterday, while rummaging through a cabinet in a meeting room, I found this item which brought back a lot of memories from more than a decade ago. 1.44 MB used to be huge at a time. Hard to explain it to kids now, but that's the way it was. Wow, I am suddenly feeling old too.

Anyways, I have real fond memories of booting up the 286 machine that belonged to my friend. One disk was used to bootup and then the next was used to load prince. Yep, prince of persia in DOS. We used to spend quite a bit time, just going through the limited commands on the boot disk and reading the help for these. It was tough to maintain these disks too. Kerala is pretty humid and if these disks were not kept properly, you always had the danger of getting fungus on the disk inside and spoiling it. Pretty soon programs started getting bigger and we used to carry multiple floppies around. Then the age of the CDs started and that was pretty much the end of the floppies.

Nowadays, there are no machines which come with floppy drives. But if you look at the BIOS program, it still has the option for the floppy drive. Wonder why they do that. Maybe they are too attached to remove it? ;-)

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