Computing superstore PC World said it will no longer sell the storage devices, affectionately known as floppies, once existing stock runs out.I was reminded of a time in ’98 when I was in business school at Baylor. It was during a period when we thought that the 250 MB Zip Drive (from Iomega) was the end-all-be-all storage device. Hankamer’s B-school computer lab Dells still had the 5 ¼ inch disk drives on them. I joked to a lab partner that I thought it’d be hilarious if I turned in a project on multiple floppies which were only capable of storing 300 Kilobytes. Can you imagine getting a project that was a stack of 15 5 ¼-inch floppies all rubber-banded together?
New storage systems, coupled with a need to store more than the 1.44 megabytes of data held by a standard floppy, have led to its demise.
Today’s equivalent would be like getting handed a stack of zip disks. You’d be hard pressed to find a drive for them. That is, unless, you can find one of those old Hankamer Dells.
2 comments:
And only about 10 years after Apple introduced the iMac...
I had a USB Zip drive. Then I bought a used computer with a built-in Zip drive, so I sold the USB drive. Then the computer broke, so I sold it.
I neglected to consider that I had a stack of zip disks left. I'd get rid of them, but who knows what's on them? I should probably e-mail somebody here to see if they have a zip drive...
Funny how we still don't have a good standard for rewritable, removable media. Some crazy combination of CDRs, e-mail attachments, and USB flash drives has taken its place.
It could have been removable media cards, if only there weren't 10 different varieties.
If Sony had been smart, 15 years ago they would have introduced their MiniDisc drives as removable computer storage and we'd just now be starting to get rid of them...
i still have a zip drive on my computer. i haven't used it in years though
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