As legend has it, Bill Gates supposedly said in the early days of the PC that 640 kilobytes of memory were “enough for anybody.” Whether he ever actually said it is disputed – Gates himself denies it to this day. But the quote has stuck around, because it captures so neatly the question everyone was asking back then: how much is actually enough?

Today the very same question is back – for a surprisingly different reason.

The stack of paper on your desk keeps growing, the file folder is bursting at the seams, and at some point you make the decision: from now on, everything goes digital. A few weeks later, the stack is growing again – and your guilty conscience right along with it.

The problem is almost never the technology. It’s the sorting.

Every day we type addresses that start with three letters almost nobody thinks about: www. They have become as ordinary as the light switch on the wall.

And yet none of it existed a little over 35 years ago – and the idea behind it was born not in a tech company, but in a physics lab.

Photos used to sit in shoeboxes up in the attic, where they survived for decades. Today thousands of pictures live on a smartphone – and, paradoxically, they are more at risk than the old paper prints ever were.

Why is that – and what can you do about it?

You open a document, change a line and click the little square icon at the top left. Saved. What you just clicked on is the stylized image of a 3.5-inch floppy disk – an object most adults haven’t held in their hands for twenty years.

When was the last time you actually held a floppy disk?