The museum.
Every top-level category descends from something you could hold. Nine relics, their true stories, and their living heirs in the registry.
The floppy disk1971–2011
IBM's original 1971 floppy was eight inches wide and genuinely floppy; by the time the rigid 3.5-inch shell arrived, the name no longer described anything you could see. The final common format held 1.44 MB — half of one modern phone photo. The disk stopped shipping, but its silhouette still means “save” in software used by people who have never touched one.
The compact cassette1963–2000s
Philips introduced the compact cassette in 1963 and made a decision that shaped decades: it licensed the format to everyone for free, so every manufacturer adopted it. Forty-five minutes a side meant a mixtape was sequenced in advance and committed to — no reordering, no undo. The Walkman turned that constraint into the first truly portable personal soundtrack.
The VHS tape1976–2008
VHS beat the technically sharper Betamax on the things households actually weighed: longer recording time and a lower price. It built an entire ritual economy — the rental shop, the late fee, the sticker asking you to be kind and rewind. It was the last mainstream video format where finding a scene was physical work measured in whirring minutes.
The instant photo1948–today
Edwin Land's 1948 Polaroid camera put the darkroom inside the print: the developing chemistry rode along in the frame and finished its work in your hand. Shaking it never sped anything up — Polaroid eventually said so out loud. Digital killed the business twice, and the format still refuses to die, because a photograph you can hold arrives with a weight a file never has.
The punch card1928–1970s
Herman Hollerith punched the 1890 US census onto cards; IBM standardized the 80-column card in 1928, and for half a century one card meant one line. Terminals adopted the same width so a screen row could hold a card, which is why eighty columns still polices your code style today. Careful programmers reserved the last columns for sequence numbers, so a dropped deck could be machine-sorted back into a program.
The metal sort1450–1970s
For five centuries a font was a physical inventory: one metal block per letter, per size, per style. Compositors kept capitals in the upper of two wooden cases and small letters in the lower — the entire etymology of uppercase and lowercase. The spacing strips between lines were cast from lead, which is why your CSS still sets “leading.”
The airmail envelope1918–today
Email was pure 7-bit ASCII text for its first two decades — no images, no sound, no attachments. MIME, published as RFC 1341 in 1992 by Nathaniel Borenstein and Ned Freed, taught messages to declare what they carry, and the labels it introduced became this entire registry. Every Content-Type header on the web is an airmail sticker that escaped the post office.
The Utah teapot1975–today
In 1975 Martin Newell needed a test object with curves, self-shadowing and a hole, so he modeled the Melitta teapot from his own kitchen table. The dataset was free, hard to render well, and instantly everywhere — it remains the most-rendered object in graphics history. The famous squashed proportions are Jim Blinn's: he scaled it for an early display and the squash simply stuck. The real teapot sits in the Computer History Museum.
The parcelalways
multipart never had hardware to lose; it is the registry's way of shipping several things as one. A random boundary string separates the parts the way packing tape separates a parcel's contents from the world. Half a century of formats came and went, and every web form upload still ships as multipart/form-data — the cardboard box of the internet.
The registry never deletes: formats retire, their labels stay registered. This whole site is the museum's catalog — the exhibits above are just the wings.