This is a floppy disk. It lives in a museum in a former salt mine in Kansas.
The Kansas Underground Salt Museum in Hutchinson is a strange and wonderful below-ground amalgam of how a former salt mine worked plus exhibits that take advantage of the low humidity, steady cool temperatures and below-ground protection from tornadoes and other threats to archival items.
There are Hollywood costumes down there, underground vaults full of important papers and this little tech exhibit of floppy disks. One of my friends held up my then-cellphone next to the floppy, to show its size.
The gray thing hanging off my phone is a Japanese charm of the big gray cat-creature from My Neighbor Totoro. Nowadays, my Android phone doesn’t have a place for such decorations.
The phone was supposed to show how far we’d come from floppies, but now it, too, is outdated.
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