Yesterday was trash-pickup day for our street. Our trash collectors aren’t too careful, so we sometimes get pieces of wind-blown garbage lying around.

While walking to our local store for some cat-related supplies, I saw such an item. It was a 5.25″ floppy disk labeled “Turbo C.” That’s C, not C++. The copyright date in the fine print was 1986… I was a sophomore in high school at that point. It was sub-labeled “Integrated Development Environment,” but when I looked for a disk number (something like “disk 3 of 27”), there wasn’t one. It took me a few seconds to remember that a full-fledged IDE would fit on a single disk back then. I didn’t think to check for a reinforcing ring, but I think it was only a standard-density disk, which only held 360kB — high-density disks (which held 1.2MB) were quite expensive at that point, I paid something like four dollars for a single high-density disk a couple years later, for college.

Ah, the good old, bad old days of yore. 🙂