In 1998, San Francisco installed the latest cutting-edge technology to run the train network: floppy disks. A quarter of a century later and the city's transportation agency is still using the same system.
A Formula 1 racing fan attending the recent Miami Grand Prix was told at the gate that he couldn't bring in his mirrorless camera, so he came up with an unusual alternate plan: he instead decided to shoot the race with a floppy disk camera made in 2000.
A photographer cut open a floppy disk to use the plastic inside as an infrared filter on his Sony a7 II mirrorless camera.
Back in the mid to late 1990s, digital cameras had a storage problem: they either used expensive memory cards or built-in memory with limited capacity and awkward cables.
It's easy to take memory cards for granted and forget how far we've come, but that 256GB microSD card in your camera bag is nothing short of a modern day miracle. Don't believe us? Just check out this "blast from the past" tour of old digital cameras that used floppy disks as their "memory cards".
"The manufacturers have found a way of storing a whole roll of transparencies onto a tiny disk," says Tomorrow's World presenter Maggie Philbin in this short clip. But she couldn't have guessed how primitive that groundbreaking floppy disk technology would seem just 30 years later.
If you were into photography in the early days of digital cameras, you probably remember the "revolutionary" Sony Mavica line, which used 3.5-inch floppy disks as 1.44MB "memory cards".
If you thought Photoshop 1.0 was primitive, take a look at the video above. What you’re watching is a short section of film shot at the Amiga launch conference that took place in 1985.
Specifically, you're watching world-renown artist Andy Warhol using his first ever computer to digitally edit a photograph of Debbie Harry by “painting” over it using the Amiga’s graphic program.
If you want to snap a photograph of the sun (perhaps during an eclipse) without burning your …
If we were still living in the age of floppy disks, what would installing something like Adobe Photoshop CS4 …