| Nibble:
Floppy Drives Market Softens.................................. |
Does anyone still use
floppy drives?
Nearly all the data I exchange with my colleagues goes
via email, and I can still remember getting a nasty virus from accidentally
leaving a floppy in my PC years ago.
Yes, I was using anti virus software at the time, but it did
take a couple of hours to get rid of it. Friends I know say that their kids are
very good at stuffing food into PC orifices such as floppy slots and DVD
drawers. So maybe it's time for the industry to create a new type of non
invasive portable storage connection for the generation of the future. Or is
that called
web storage?
Today's
interchangeable portable storage devices tend to be
Flash Memory sticks and cards
connected via USB. Unlike
the standard 3.5" floppy, which was designed to fit into an HP engineer's
shirt pocket (that was before Dilbert was invented - but you get the idea)
today's solid state storage devices will fit in your camera or a key ring, and
typically contain 100 times as much storage as a standard floppy.
You
may find it difficult to believe that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in
Apple IIs and the original IBM PC, the operating system would fit onto one
floppy, while the software application such as the word processor, would fit
ontp another. On a single floppy drive PC you would have to plug floppies in and
out each time you changed application. As drives got cheaper the market started
to produce PCs with two floppy drives. But the high volumes of the PC market
eventually enabled hard
drive manufacturers to achieve cost of scale economies which drove down the
cost and made them affordable by consumers. | |
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