I remember my buddy's Amiga taking something like 5 5.25" floppy disks, if not more, to actually boot up.

If I had the time I'd find one of those programs that does size comparisons to show how many of those disks it would take to hold the same amount of data as the 8gb SDHC card I just bought for my camera.

dude, it's call CALC.EXE

a 5.25" floppy, single sided, held 360KB of data, 720KB if double sided. let's use the single sided number...

8GB is 8192MB which is 8388608KB

and thus about 23302 x the size of a 360KB floppy

Storage was tiny back then. Of course, so were operating systems. We could get away with it because we expected so much less out of our computers back then. No "streaming video from the internet while I play Minecraft and Farmville simultaneously in separate virtual machines." Hell, we had to jump through all kinds of hoops to perform a simple floating point operation in those days.

Mr Fred - I know I could do the calcs in terms of numbers of disks. I was actually thinking more of a visual comparison between the number of disks. It's kind of like those Federal spending visuals you see where they show you how much an average person makes compared to a trillion $1 bills.

I'm guessing that the old disks were 5.25 square and 0.0625 (1/16") thick. Doing that yields the following:

23,302 disks x 0.0625"/disk = 1456.375 inches tall. Divide that by 12"/ft and we get 121.36'.

To close out my visual, we're looking at a single 8G HD card, roughly the size of a postage stamp and it holds just about as much as a 12 story tall stack of old floppies.