Scrapbook page 123
Original watercolour image for the online story The Concuspidor & the Grand Wizard of Many Things (1995). This is the scene where, returning from the Grand Wizard’s island base, the Concuspidor crashes the disk they have flown back on.
(Yes, I unashamedly used “double-sided”, “freeing up disk-space”, and — this one — “crash” as explicit word-play in the narrative for this section of the story.)
Although readers of the The Concuspidor in 1995 were certainly familiar with 5¼-inch floppies of the type illustrated here, they already had an old-fashioned feel, because rigid-cased 3½-inch floppies had largely superseded them. Today, most people only encounter the floppy disk as one of many abstract symbols in the iconography of our sudden digital age. A once ubiquitous thing so quickly forgotten now signifies the verb “to save”.