It used to be you could get a floppy disk for about a dollar. If you needed to give a colleague a document it was easy to do so with a floppy disk, and there was no point in returning it.

Today, it's easy to get a 1GB flash drive/card for $8 or so, but that's a bit beyond the point of just handing them out like candy and far too much capacity for simple document exchange.

Moore's Law says we ought to expect 512MB flash cards these days for about a dollar. Something like an SD card would be a perfect replacement for these cases where e-mail isn't the best solution, and surely manufacturing costs are such that a 3.5" floppy disk had a higher materials cost than a SD card, just in terms of plastic and metal.

Here's to finding a $10 10-pack of 512MB SD Cards at Staples sometime soon. Next up: very tiny pens to label them.

From Where are the $1 Flash Cards? by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License