How many floppies can you fit on a USB flash drive?

Unless you’ve been using computers since the first home computers of the early 1980s, or maybe the IBM PC compatibles that followed towards the end of that decade, it’s difficult to imagine what it was like to work with what seems now to be infinitesimal amounts of storage.

At the time, of course, computers with 32Kb of memory and floppy disks with 1.44Mb capacities presented almost limitless possibilities, but such amount seem ridiculous in these days where a single MP3 takes up a few megabytes (which means I could have stored about five on the first hard disk I ever owned).

Flickr user Curtiss Spontelli has put it all into perspective though, which a detailed chart that shows how data storage has evolved over the years. He presents three categories — music, photos and data — and uses popular storage mediums of the past to show how capacities compare.

There are no great revelations here, particularly to anyone who knows how many kilobytes make up a megabyte and can use a calculator, but it’s useful to see how the numbers stack up side-by-side.

It would be interesting to similar something to show how download speeds have developed over the last couple of decades. As someone who still remembers waiting for what seemed like an age for files of a few kilobytes to download over a 600 baud modem, I still occasionally marvel at how quickly a 300Mb file gets pulled down an ADSL connection…

[ Evolution of Storage via Gizmodo]