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June 27, 2024. 06:38 AM
People often laugh at me because of my attachment to certain old technologies like floppy drives, DVDs, portable MP3 players, and CRT displays. They call me eccentric for using these things and ignoring modern alternatives like cloud storage, LCD displays, Spotify, and so on.
My motivation to keep using these technologies is actually quite simple and relatable. When I tell them, people often admit that I have a point. Some even ask me questions about it, curious if they can apply the same strategies for their own work.
To begin, I must say, I do not use them for nostalgia. I did not grow up in the early days of computers. Being Brazilian, I jumped from a totally pre-computer era straight to the Windows 98 era. I didn’t live the C64, IBM PC, Apple ][, and Windows 3.1 eras, and I do not associate any of these things with a comforting time from my past.
At the time, Brazil was going through a complicated period of technological import ban. It’s weird to talk about this, because in retrospect, it was an obviously stupid idea. But, Brazilian politicians are true factories of stupidity, so it is not surprising. They banned the imports of tech during the 1970s and 1980s in order to protect the local production. As such, DOS era computers were restricted, rare, expensive, with terrible quality, and software was very limited.
In the 1990s, when I was a kid, the ban was revoked, and computers finally poured in from abroad. But, by then, the main OS being used was Windows 98 under the early Intel processors. The average Brazilian could only afford computers for businesses at first. And, that’s how I started using these machines: my father brought a computer from work, because he was supposed to learn how to use it. I was curious about it, so I fiddled with it for a bit.
There were floppy drives at that time, but they didn’t last very long. Almost as soon as floppies arrived in Brazil, they were being replaced by USB sticks and DVDs. Computers no longer came with floppy drives, but only with DVD burners. So, I saw floppies for a brief window of time, and never really learned how they worked. I didn’t even know about the read-only switch in their case.
I admit that I have some nostalgia for the Windows XP era, though. Some things were objectively better at that time. Social media, for example.
The most popular social network website in Brazil was Orkut, a simple, PHP-based network where each person had a profile with some basic information, a few photos, and a list of friends. And, Orkut was much better than any modern social media like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. At the time, Orkut was not this narcissistic, diseased, endless-scrolling brain rot, where sensationalist crap jumps at your face all the time, and everyone’s main goal is becoming an influencer and making some buck with clicks. Followers were not a thing.
We had friends and recommendations of friends, which were usually friends of our friends. It was all based on geography. As such, we got to actually meet new people based on shared interests, rather than spend all day arguing with dimwits over politics and whatever else in the comments section.
Another thing that was objectively better at the time was music. There was nothing like this streaming centered system, where you must pay an expensive subscription to have access to music. There was nothing like this “renting” system that exists today. There were MP3 files that we downloaded illegally—though, I would definitely buy the file if I had access to a store, and the price was in my range. We played these files anywhere: Winamp, portable MP3 players, radios (after burning them to DVDs), car stereos, Windows Media Player, etc.
There were no ads, no need for memory-hogging ad-block extensions, no subscription, no giving-up your data, and not even the need for an internet connection. We had MP3 files and we played them. The end. I still use MP3 files to listen to music, because what services like Spotify and YouTube Premium are offering is inferior and more expensive.
Which brings me to storage. Nowadays, we take for granted the idea that our files do not belong to us. They’re stored “in the cloud,” under the protection of highly powerful corporations like Microsoft and Google. Our photos, texts, songs, videos, images, they are all there, perfectly protected behind a friendly login screen. All we need to do is enter a web browser, type our e-mail, click a button, and voilà: our files.
But, why is this any better? Some time ago, I used to find the cloud incredible, because I didn’t understand how it worked. It looked so practical and advanced. I had a Google Drive account with a bunch of information—a personal journal that I had been writing for three years, a bunch of pictures, texts, drafts of books, and so on. I also had a YouTube channel.
Then, I commented with my YouTube account on a video, and YouTube flagged me for hate speech. It wasn’t the first time.
It was no hate speech. But, we all know how this goes: if you say some things that bother some people, and these things are true, people report your comment in mass and it gets deleted. Maybe I shouldn’t have entered an ideologically charged right wing YouTube video and said something that pissed every single one of them. Anyway, YouTube banned my account—including my Google Drive. I lost all my files.
I tried to recover my files, but it was like talking to a dumb robot. Probably because I was actually talking to a robot as I tried to have my case analyzed. I never used a cloud service again, not because I wanted to be free to do hate speech, but because I couldn’t bear leaving my files in the hands of a company that had so much power over me. They could take years of my work and turn it into dust in a blink of an eye, and give me no way to defend against this.
This made me question things, and it was the beginning. It made me realize that some new things are not really a technological improvement. We are sold that these cloud services are new and advanced technologies, and the old ways are obsolete, but we don’t realize that this is not really a matter of technology, but of marketing.
Take Microsoft Office, for example. They sell a very expensive subscription to Office 360, “software as a service,” for you to buy. I learned to use Office in Windows 98, which used Office 95 (if I recall correctly). It was a perfectly fine and usable system.
I got to update my Office suite in the XP era, when I started using
Word 2007. It was very good. It was the first time Microsoft
Word used the docx format, so it was quite compatible with
modern systems. I liked it. It was perfect.
All future updates of Microsoft Office were, to me, pointless. Why would I pay a fortune (in local money) to buy the same software with some cosmetic changes? Office 2013, for example, didn’t bring anything new to the table. Nor did Office 360. It’s the same app—the exact same app—that had been refurbished and resold as a new, innovative, modern thing.
With cloud storage, it felt the same. I was going to pay Google to offer me storage space, which was something that had already been invented in the 1960s. I had a USB stick, at the time, with 250 MB of storage. Later, I had another USB stick with 4 GB, and later, 8 GB. The price of these devices also dropped significantly. One month of One Drive subscription cost almost as much as a new USB stick, but the stick would last me for a decade, and all the files inside it were mine.
Google was not offering me anything new and incredible. It was reinventing the wheel, giving it another name, painting it with a new color, and selling it like it was the technology of the century.
As I learned JavaScript and web development some years back, I got to understand a very simple concept that should have been taught to everyone, everywhere: there is no such a thing as “the cloud”. The cloud is just someone else’s computer.
Somewhere in the USA, inside a building that belongs to Google, there is a massive computer system. That’s where my files are saved. This system has a bunch of redundancies to keep my files safe, but what I’m doing is renting their computer to store my files.
Isn’t it overkill to pay every month to rent a super-computer halfway across the world to store my 3 MB of text files? Or, to store my 25 GB of MP3 files, or 8 GB of pictures? After all, if I saved these files on DVDs, I would only need about 9 or 10 DVDs, which would cost me a third of a monthly subscription to Google Drive.
“Oh, but these files are protected! Only you can access!” Some may say.
I always encrypt my personal files with a good algorithm and a very lengthy and difficult password. So, the files are still protected. Plus, I don’t need to give away my phone number to a company that will probably sell it to spam telemarketers. Also, I don’t have to worry about my account being stolen if my phone is stolen.
“Oh, but you can lose your DVDs if your house is set on fire!” Sure, and this argument is very common. But, as experience showed me, it’s much easier to lose my files on a cloud account. Before I lost my account after being banned from Google, I lost another account for another reason: two-factor authentication.
Brazil is not like rich countries. Your smartphone will get stolen eventually. It’s not a matter of if, but when—and “when” is “soon.” Especially if you live in places like São Paulo and Rio. As such, if you set up two-factor authentication, when your phone gets stolen, you will never be able to recover the account.
Back in the day, it was very hard to recover a stolen number. So, without SMS to confirm that it was you, Google or Microsoft would not let you in. Your account would be there, forever locked, impossible to access. Any attempts to recover your files would be a depressing exercise of trying to talk to the dumbest robot on Earth.
In comparison, a shelf of DVDs can stay there, safe and sound, for decades. The DVD cases fit perfectly alongside books. You must check the DVD every year or so to make sure it’s not deteriorating, and if it is, all you need to do is buy another DVD and re-record the contents—a very cheap process that takes only a few minutes.
Maybe, if you live in a place with high probability of disasters like fires and flooding, you can keep your files inside small USB sticks, and keep them in your escape bag. But, most people don’t have to worry about that.
Now, this conversation brings me back to the floppy drive. Floppies are notoriously small for modern standards. They can only hold 1.44 MB. A single photo is already bigger than that. But, if you’re a writer like me, and you use plain text files to work, a couple of floppies are the best way to do daily backups of your work. Seriously.
Floppies let you record and re-record data, unlike DVDs, that only let you burn data once. Well, RW-DVDs exist, but I never got to make them work. For some reason, they always go bad after a few recordings. Maybe the ones sold in Brazil are crappy.
Either way, text is very small. My personal directory of files, of which 98% is text files, weighs no more than 2 MB—and that’s because I have a few SQLITE databases that I backed up from software that I use. Only the texts have less than 1 MB. A USB stick for so little data is overkill. DVDs wouldn’t work either, because I make daily backups of data. Therefore, floppies are the ideal technology.
This makes me think of something: floppies didn’t really get obsolete. Obsolescence happens when a new technology comes to improve on a previous one, while fulfilling the same role. But, the role of the floppy is not the same role as the DVD or the USB stick.
Floppies are supposed to give you a compact, quick-to-access, readable and writable storage media up to 1.44 MB. They’re perfect for MIDI files, text files, pixel art, and very small software and binaries.
Meanwhile, USB sticks are good for heavier files, and for rapid reading and writing. Like, you have some movies inside your USB stick, and you plug it on the computer and read the files from the USB stick directly. USB data transfer is fast enough to let you have a smooth experience.
And DVDs are good for long-term storage of read-only files—stuff that, once saved, will no longer be changed, but will be read constantly. So, music, video, photos, anything that you want to keep to re-watch and access easily, that’s personal, will be there.
What does cloud offer, then? It offers safe(-ish) storage of files that you can access anywhere, and that you can share with others, like coworkers, over the internet. Like, you are a college student, and you’re developing a project with colleagues, so you create a shared directory between them to be accessed over the web. It’s good for corporations and for collaborative work, but it sucks for personal storage of files.
So, that is my point. I don’t like to see technology in terms of obsolete versus novelty. There are some real obsolete technologies, but it only happens when a new and better thing shows up to offer the same function—like the DVD, which came to offer the same solution that VHS tapes offered, but better.
But, not all technologies are rendered obsolete by new stuff, and we need to have a critical eye to know the difference. Most of what is told nowadays about novelty is pure marketing. Companies want to sell you the old thing under a new name, because that’s how they make money. But, they’re making money off of your naive thirst for novelty, by tricking you.
Don’t let that happen.