I pulled out my floppy disc collection from the past millennium with the hopes of finding a cool photo or two. For those of you under age 22 I know that you are asking, “What’s a floppy disc?” This second generation disc was a hard plastic case about 3.5” square and had a retractable metal sleeve that protected the surface of the disc that spun inside. I have a couple hundred of these things sitting in boxes that I have yet to transfer to a more modern media.

For the youngsters, each floppy disc was capable of holding an incredible 1.44 megabytes of information. That is about 1/3 of a single mp3 music file. We were blown away with that amount of information storage on a portable disc. We would take this disc and pop it into a huge brick of a digital camera and could capture about 10 photos before filling the disc. Compare that with a postage stamp 8gig memory card today. That means that that the little SD card laying on my desk could hold 5,555 floppy discs... That’s absolutely incredible!!!

Back in 1998 I was the proud owner of a Sony Mavica digital camera. I still have it sitting on my shelf and it makes the best, most secure door stop ever invented. I took a photo and listened to the camera go through about 8 to 10 seconds of recording gyrations before it told me the image was safely captured. It is hard to believe how wowed we were just 13 years ago when we compare the Mavica with the digital cameras that I currently use. The difference is similar to a 100 years ago when the world went from horse drawn buggies to automobiles. But I am not referring to a hundred years ago. Instead, I am just referring back to when our youngest child Aaron was born.

The following photo comes from a floppy disc created on May 24, 1998. The image was captured at the highest quality of the day at 640px x 480px. The image was positioned between photos of two different houses that I inspected. Just 13 years ago each image was precious. Storage on hard drives was limited and we took each picture sparingly, knowing that a 640 x480 picture was way too large to transfer over the internet because of our phone line modem connections. If we wanted to share the image, then we would reduce it to 200x200 or less and then hear the complaints from the recipients over the 45 minute wait that it required for them to download the email file.

I look forward to your guesses. Who the two individuals are in the picture?