Geek Nostalgia - Hey Ben, what's 8" long and kinda flaccid till you stick it in the place where it functions best? A floppy disk circa 1979, of course. Yes, I'm just barely old enough to dimly remember the jumbo precursor to the classic 5.25-inch single-sided floppy, that old standby of the 1980s personal computer revolution. (My grade-school friend Fabian actually had a TRS-80 that used a cassette tape player as its storage device!)

It has now been five years since Apple rocked the computing world by deleting the successor 3.5" floppy from its original iMac. Though it took until 2003 for Dell to follow suit with its floppy-less standard configuration, as a result the drive is quickly becoming a "relic of the past," according to today's Washington Post. Honestly, if you need to move the kind of files that will fit on a floppy between computers, you can just as easily email them to yourself these days. Next up on the endangered list, say pundits: serial ports.

What do you remember about your first time with a computer, Ben?