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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."
Next thing you know, they're going to take away our serial ports and PS/2 ports. Bastards.
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I remember when they ADDED the new-fangled 3 1/4 inch floppy drive to machines.
Back before there was dirt, and a computer weighed 6,000 tons!
And we programmed with ones and with zeros - and sometimes we ran out of ones!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
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).
Hopefully they get rid of all of the "extra" stupid buttons on the mouse too...
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.
Actually I made it my business to get a 5 1/4" installed in my Athlon, just in case, you know, I want to run WordStar.
You're not kidding... I seems the quality of drives and media has gone down. I remember being in high school ('86-'90), I'd carry about floppies with me all year around (blistering heat of summer and bone chilling cold of winter in Chicago). I'd never have a problem with them, I'd hope from one computer to another with the media. Try that now days... The floppy will work in one drive but not the next... WTF?!
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
PS/2 <-> USB converter.
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?
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
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.
I'll assume you've got some figures to support this otherwise baseless claim?
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
That's nothing. Why, when I was a young lad my parents used to make me wear floppy disks as clothing!
My old man would wake me up at 2:00 in the morning and make me format floppy disks untill 5:00 the following morning and I liked it! I loved it! I used to store the entire ecyclopedia britannica on only 245,037,072 disks and it suited me just fine!
Tell that to them kids today and they won't believe ya.
Most of the personal computer industry is catching up to the changes Apple made 5 years ago, and they have been since the Apple ][.
Five(ish) years ago, Apple decided to allow 3rd party manufacturers of Mac hardware to bring down costs (much like the PC industry had done 15 years earlier). It almost killed them, and they stopped allowing this practice (well, very tightly clamped down on it) only a few months later.
Funny how one person's 5-years-too-soon may equal another person's 15-years-too-late, and what makes one can break the other.
Is that 900MB Canadian or 900MB U.S.? If it's Canadian then that comes out to about 700MB U.S. right? I wasn't aware they sold 900MB Canadian discs.. must be a perk of paying that music industry tax on recordable media.
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?