Long Live Floppies

Like the penny, the floppy drive is hardly worth the trouble, computer makers say. Dell stopped including a floppy drive in new PCs in spring 2003, and Gateway has followed suit on some models. Floppies are available on request for $10 to $20 extra. Floppy Disk Becoming Relic of the Past [Yahoo.com].

Well, tell me something new. Apple stopped using floppy drives way back in in 1999 with the original iMac. Tiny USB drives have made floppies, Zip catridges and all sorts of external storage devices all but irrelevant. The march of technology goes on. Floppies are dead; long live floppies.

In many ways this is history repeating itself. Twenty years ago, PC users laughed at Mac users about those tiny, incompatible 3.5" floppy disks. "Still no 5.25" floppy drive." And they laughed about SCSI, which wasn't as "standard" as all those MFM and RLR drives and proprietary hard cards known in the DOS world. Eventually the Windows world embraced the 3.5" floppy. And many of the best performing PCs of only a few years ago used SCSI for best throughput, not the poky old IDE drives that had become dominant on less expensive clones.

I think they just don't like change -- especially if Apple invents it.

 Posted by glenn