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White House CIO Describes His 'Worst Day' Ever
dcblogs writes "In the first 40 days of President Barack Obama's administration, the White House email system was down 23% of time, according to White House CIO Brook Colangelo, the person who also delivered the 'first presidential Blackberry.' The White House IT systems inherited by the new administration were in bad shape. Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. Desktops, for instance, still had floppy disk drives, including the one Colangelo delivered to Rahm Emanuel, Obama's then chief of staff and now Mayor of Chicago. There were no redundant email servers."
If only... None of the HP machines we've bought at work in the past couple of years have had them and we buy both the slimline desktop variety and mini-tower PCs. The few Dells I've seen likewise don't have any floppy ports on the motherboard.
As for build-your-own PCs, or ones from companies that assemble generic parts into PCs, very few come with floppy ports on the motherboard. Indeed, the only non-industrial Intel motherboards I know of that have a floppy port are the ASRock Extreme boards - and that's powered by a SuperIO chip on the motherboard, as chipset support for floppies was dropped by Intel years ago.
Note: the reason I mention all this is because I'm looking at getting a Z77 motherboard in the next few months with a floppy connector, so that I can hook up a 5.25" floppy drive I've acquired (purely for the heck of it, before anyone asks - I've a big box of old disks from the early 90s that I wouldn't mind rummaging through, the PC I used for those having been chucked out years back). ASRock are pretty much the only option nowadays and I have no doubts that when Haswell comes out next year the old 37-pin floppy connector will be well and truly extinct.