How many Elvis songs could be stored on a floppy disk?

I always find it a bit surreal when I think of the childhoods of the next couple of generations.  I mean, my genreation was pretty much the last one where computers were still becoming a staple in every household.  My family didn't get a home computer until I was 10 or 11.  Before then, the only exposure to computers I had was either at friends' houses, or at school.

In grade 4, we did a little bit of toying around with Microsoft Word, to help familiarize us with how it worked, I guess because the VSB decided that this Internet thing would be here to stay.  You could tell I wasn't all that familiar with computers because I found entertainment in the antics of Clippy on Word 95.

He could turn into a bicycle, use his sheet of paper as a slide, and generally do anything except be useful.  I realize this now.  But to my 9 year old self, it was riveting.

When we got a computer, my whole family got obsessed with Bounce Out.  Flash games were such a mind-blowing concept to me at the time, but imagine a 9 year old being transfixed by that game 20 years from now; probably not going to happen.

For the rest of elementary school, when we needed to bring something in to print at school, we would bring in floppy disks.  This is probably the part of the inevitable generation gap that I find the strangest: the floppy disk.  It was short-lived, and would have no relevance in my mind whatsoever if it hadn't been universally adopted as the "Save" icon.

"What do you mean it only holds 1.44 MB?  That's like 10 minutes of music."

Kids 20 years from now will universally accept that the image of the floppy disk means "Save" without ever being aware of why.  I find that weird.  Load up Word right now, glance over at the "Save" button, and try to imagine that you have no frame of reference for what it depicts.  Kids will just assume that the purple-ish square means save.

"Where's the touch screen?"

The fact that I was already 11 when we got a computer was the major reason I've never really gotten the hang of email.  It was still new enough that it wasn't something I needed in order to function, and I had gotten along fine to that point, so I didn't know if it was something I should want or not.  I registered a Yahoo! account, but rarely used it.  Even now, I am terrible at getting into the habit of checking my email and responding when necessary.  I must say, since I got a phone that alerts me when I receive an email, I've gotten a bit better, but even now, I likely will just glance at what the email is and then ignore it.

Because of this, my inbox ends up overloaded with entirely useless emails, which I leave there until the number of unread emails threatens to reach quadruple digits.  At that point, I go through and delete what I don't need (almost all of it).  What I end up left with is various schoolwork, records of my paychecks, and right now, a folder with the entire Animorphs series so that I can re-read it, which I am stoked about.

I just got through one of these virtual cleanses, and while doing so, came across something that made me lament my lackadaisical email checking:

The one above that, entitled :O, is the Animorphs email.

 How can I have missed Elvis Impersonator tickets?!  Oh man, the things I miss out on because I don't checks often enough.  That was the Groupon offer from late November; I only noticed it mid-February.  While writing the beginning of this post, I all of a sudden realized something.  For the generation before mine, when computers and YouTube weren't everyday things, Elvis impersonators were pretty much the closest you could come to seeing Elvis perform.  The generational gaps rear their ugly heads.  I figure that when I have kids, I will either explain floppy disks with a throwaway line just so they understand the "Save" icon, or I will spin an elaborate lie to convince them that floppy disks were the most important things ever at the time; everyone carried around a case with several disks at all times; there were special "trading card"-type disks which kids would swap for their collections; really, just a huge lie, just to fuck with their heads so that they think that society was completely moronic.

Oh, that's an unfortunate photo...