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Dell Dropping The Floppy

Posted by timothy on from the drop-away dept.

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."

4 of 1,198 comments (clear)

  1. Blasphemy! by Captain+Tenille · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I mean, floppies aren't useful for much, but when you need one, you really need one.

    Next thing you know, they're going to take away our serial ports and PS/2 ports. Bastards.

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  2. OK with me by The+Bungi · · Score: 5, Insightful
    As long as they *provide* the pen drive or similar device, *and* place an easily accessible USB or FireWire port on the front of the chassis. If they're going to remove the floppy and force me to reach around the damn box then it probably won't work.

    And I really don't think a CDR/CDRW is yet the answer to storage, unless UDF is standardized enough (as in supported at the OS level).

  3. Floppy uses by Wattsman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Can I boot from a USB drive? And what about all of those install disks I still get? Hard Drive manufacturers still have their disk setup programs based on a floppy disk install.
    Also, I can't use USB drives at the machines at work (due to security risks of removing sensitive data). Sure, you can remove data on a floppy, but try doing that with a 50+ MB compressed file.

  4. We know what's going to happen... by Millennium · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Apple dropped the floppy five years ago. The whole industry predicted that either it would kill Apple, or they'd have floppy drives back in the very next generation of machines.

    Neither happened. Life went on, because the floppy really was archaic and outdated; alternatives really did exist.

    Now, granted, these were Macs, which have just about always had much better hardware/software integration than five years previous. As a Mac user myself, this argument of "but what about machines which don't boot off of USB or Firewire?" looks utterly absurd, because, well, why the hell aren't these machines capable of booting off of it? Or this bit about "How can the average user make bootable CD's?"; why the hell should making bootable CD's be so difficult that the average user can't do it?

    Maybe it's just that I come from a Mac background, where things Just Work. But honestly, it sounds like the only reasons to keep the floppy around on the PC would be dealing with fundamental flaws in the PC's architecture. Then again, it's rather ironic that Dell uses a "you wouldn't use a processor that was 15 years old" when they use an outdated architecture that's even older, so maybe there's something to that. A blind insistence on pack-ratting old technologies, maybe, at the expense of advancement?