Websites are rapidly growing in size, and this isn’t just the number of pages each site has, but also the amount of data that is required to make the pages visually appealing and functional. But what does this look like in context?
I was born in the mid-80s and had parents who adopted technology in their lifestyles pretty early on, so I had my fair share of experiences with floppy-disks (the later 3.5-inch version). To see how far things have developed since the height of floppy disks, I thought it would interesting to reference the size of Croud’s website in the context of these diskettes.
Floppy disk
One floppy disk has the capacity of 1,440 KiB (1.44MB). If we were to start with the world’s first website, it was 703KB large and fitted on a single floppy disk. Moving on from this, come the 90s Windows 95 was distributed on 23 floppy disks. By 2019, when we look at Croud’s website, to store all of the assets, we’d need a whopping 225 floppy disks!
The reality
The idea of putting a full modern-day website on floppy disks is a somewhat ludicrous thought in today’s digital landscape. In terms of mobile, it is highly unlikely that a site visitor would view the whole website through their mobile device. Looking through a website on a page-by-page level might be more interesting for the user, and in order to understand the impact as well as see what is being downloaded over the network
