Tell me you're old...

. . .  or at least that you have old stuff. 

Yes, wee children, these are two perfectly preserved Radio Shack labels for 3.5-inch floppy disks, and somehow they escaped detection for many years, even hitching a ride south from New York. Found them yesterday while looking for something else. 

I confess that until ten years ago or so I still had some old files backed up on these kinds of disks. I didn't really need them, so they just sat there. My laptop no longer had a drive for these, but I had acquired a plugin disk drive. And about ten years ago the whole shebang went into the trash. 

But not these labels. Look, they've got instructions on the back! 

I, like probably everyone over forty, tend to think that tech is rushing too fast. Why should something still in (limited) use a decade ago seem so Cretaceous now? Ah, but to think that way ignores history since the electrification of civilization. 

In 1918, radio was barely used in households; it was mostly used by business and military organizations. In 1928, NBC had the first coast-to-coast radio network. In 1938, everyone had a radio, and there were many companies still competing in the field to deliver the best radio receivers for the best price. Ten years later, 1948, only 1 in 100 American households had a television set. In 1958, that figure was 75%, and it was driving down audiences for radio and movies. Add ten more years, and now all those top-of-the-line 1958 television sets were old hat, because most shows were broadcast in color -- and while color televisions had been around for some time, they had been pricey options and the programming for them were limited. 

In audio, we went from wax cylinders to shallac 78s to 45s to LPs to 8-tracks (ugh) to casettes to CDs to streaming in roughly ten- to twenty-year increments.  

The tech moved faster in these cases than the markets, but in other fields, like machine engineering and business and govenment computing, the implementation of new devices tends to be faster. You may be happy enough with your old lo-def TV, but your company wants an edge with its data processing. 

So yeah, ten years is not a short amount of time in innovation. It's been like that a long time. Sometimes it seems that way because the changes over time are not as visible as the removal of standard backup drives. The first Roomba, for example, sold in 2002, is not that different in purpose than the current models, but they went from random-bounce navigation to house mapping and app control. Same kind of thing on the outside, much different on the inside. 

Well, these diskette labels were a nice schlep down memory lane, but they're of no use to me now. Worse, they're of very little value for collectors on eBay. 

Anyone wanna buy a couple of unusued old-tech labels?