After at least 15 years of debating whether I should spend money on this, I recently took the plunge and acquired one of my most-desired Prince collectibles.

Added to my collection: 3.5" floppy given to press when Prince changed his name. Contains a font w/ one symbol in it. pic.twitter.com/mNL0eOHDGI

— anildash (@anildash) June 23, 2014

Part of the reason I decided to actually acquire this disk was that I’d revisited this great analysis about how Prince’s signature glyph might have been represented in Unicode if that were an option. (Prince's symbol isn't eligible to be represented in Unicode, or as an emoji, because it is trademarked and it represents an individual person.) Even better, once I’d shared the photo I’d taken of the disk, Paisley Park’s then-head designer Steven Parke, and Chank Diesel, the Minneapolis type designer whose typefaces would later become stalwarts of Prince’s packaging design, both jumped into the thread.

The latest addition to my collection is this floppy disk from 1993, distributed to press when Prince changed his name to a symbol. I was pretty surprised to see just how much interest there was in this artifact, but it was a great opportunity to bring out some of the fascinating, innovative work that Prince was doing two decades ago, and to note how fun, funny, and resonant it remains to this day.

For those asking, Prince font floppy is just a fun artifact; contents were on his CD-ROM & Compuserve 20 years ago. pic.twitter.com/Mnzrvo64wQ

— anildash (@anildash) June 23, 2014