this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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Which is why Macintosh floppy disk drives were changing their rotational speed depending on which cylinders were being accessed, so that the information density would in fact be uniform.
Which is why a Mac floppy could hold 400/800k compared to a DOS floppy's 360/720k.
So do CDs. 💿 If you have a player with a see-through lid, you can see the disc rotate around 2.5 times slower on the last track of a near-74/80-minute disc as opposed to the first. This might not apply with modern (2000+) and/or portable ones with cache (ESP) − MP3 support is a good clue it has the advanced electronics for that. And yes, CDs' track starts at the center to enable short-play, smaller disks of any diameter between 5 and 12 cm (although slot-loading players only have cutouts for the two standard sizes).
Players regulate the motor speed based on the data clock (and burners too: there is a pre-recorded "timing" signal even on blank CD-Rs) so technically, a constant-angular-velocity CD could be pressed and played on most players, just with no real benefits. The extra linear velocity at the edge would require increased laser power (or less than 1x speed) when burning, and vinyl killers (in the unlikely case they ever make a CD one) won't keep up.
Huh. Cool facts.
That's a lot of complexity added for 80kb. Curious if there was much software that just wouldn't have fit on a single floppy otherwise.
It's an 11% increase, that's huge. Floppies weren't just used to store programs, also to store files.
Some of the first real home/office PCs had only one floppy drive and 640kb of RAM. Fancier machines had a second floppy. If you were a millionaire, you could get a HDD with upwards of 30Mb storage.