How many floppy disks do you need to fit an article from The Atlantic?

In case your experience with computers started after 2010, this:

… is a 3.5 inch floppy disk. Standard capacity: 1.44MB.

Today, I tried to read this (really quite good) article from The Atlantic on my iPhone 5S.

First time around I tried in a webview. Next attempt was in Safari. It crashed both of them.

Digging for Dinosaurs in My Twenties is a little over 6,200 words and has four images. Saved in rich text format, the words come to 37KB of data, the four images total 346KB (exactly the same images are served to my desktop browser as are to my phone).

Given all the information so far, guess how many floppy disks it would take to fit an article from The Atlantic?

Answer: at least 15

“No, no,” I hear you grumble, “37 plus 346 equals 383KB which is a little over one quarter of the 1.44MB capacity of a floppy disk.”

Well, of course.

Unless you include all the other crap that comes with the article.

By the time Safari had crashed, I’d logged 21MB of ads, pixels, and associated scripts that had been downloaded onto my phone. If the main idea was to heat my phone so my hand could stay warm against the San Francisco fall, nice job everybody!

If, on the other hand, the idea was that I could read the article, without scrolling being deathly sluggish, and maybe actually make it to the end before it crashed the browser. Yeah, you failed.