Dell Dropping The Floppy

adambwells writes "Dell wants to stop including floppy drives as standard hardware on its Dimension line of desktops, and will start this practice later this quarter, as reported in this Yahoo article. Says Dell's product marketing: We would like to see customers migrate away from floppies as quickly as possible, because there are better alternative technologies out there ... it's an antique technology. At some point, you've got to draw the line. You wouldn't think of using a processor from 15 years ago." They plan to educate their customers about recordable CDs and USB pen drives as replacements."

Comments

Re:My Reasons for Wanting Those Ports

[Blkdeath]

PS/2: Tried, true, and works with my old IBM clicky-clacky keyboard. I love that keyboard, and it's waaay more durable than any newer keyboard. I've spilled beer on it and it continues clacking away.

PS/2 <-> USB converter.

Parallel Port: I'd like to keep using my older printers and my old parallel Zip Drive. It's slow, but handy sometimes.

Get a print server for your old printers (two-ports can be had for under $100, and networking them is a snap), and buy a CD-RW drive. ZIP drives are slow, kludgy, low-capacity, and have a tendency to click your media (and drive) to death at a seemingly random time (usually disk 13 of 26 is the victim). Moreover, probably 95% or more of home and office computers have CD-ROM drives of some form or another, which makes CD-R/RW discs far more portable than the very, very slim market share of ZIP drives. CD-RW drives can be had brand-new for about $75CDN and can burn 900MB worth of data to a disc in approximately 1 minute 30 seconds. 900MB discs can be had for about $0.50CDN, 800MB CD-RW discs can be had for about $3CDN or less. How much does a 100 or 250MB ZIP disk cost, again?

Serial Ports: How else are you supposed to hook up a dumb terminal to your computer. USB?

Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?

Seriously, there's no reason to drop these devices. Why not include them with the newer stuff.

Becauses the busses are slow, kludgy, and cost sillicon and valuable board real-estate that could be used for UATA133 or additional USB 2.0 (450+ MB/Sec) or IEEE1394 / FireWire (400+ MB/Sec) connectors, or to make motherboards smaller and/or less expensive.

Besides, USB is not to be trusted.

I'll assume you've got some figures to support this otherwise baseless claim?