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Tell me your storage medium and I know how old you are

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MacOS X Lion has been released earlier today as 3.5 GB download instead of on a DVD. This was a conversation starter for me and my colleague Mathijs who is the same age as me. We remembered loading games from eight 1.44MB disks and then number 7 was “always” broken so you couldn’t play the game. It would take roughly 2500 of those disks to install Lion.

The disks were in that time an improvement compared to the storage media of the Commodore 64 which loaded either from a cassette tape (fast forward to #244 to load game X, then press play and wait for 10 minutes) or from a 5.25” floppy disk which was “so much faster”. One of the junior developers was amazed to hear that you could double the floppy disk capacity by punching a hole in the side if it was officially single sided.

Suddenly I realised that he wasn’t even born when I started playing on the C64. Now I feel old.