TCS - Where Did the Floppy Go?

Where Did the Floppy Go?

by Ira Wilsker
Golden Triangle PC Club
From the October, 2004 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

Recently I helped a friend purchase a computer at one of the local electronics stores. It was a major name brand, with a powerful processor, lots of memory, a huge hard drive, fast DVD burner, and a lot of other desirable features. We went to his house, opened the boxes, connected the cables, and everything worked fine as advertised. As I attempted to move some small files from the old computer to this new colossus, I made a startling discovery that something that I had taken for granted for years was missing. I never even thought of looking for it, but now it was distinctly not there, and no where to be found. There was no floppy drive on the new computer. And then it clicked; I remembered reading in the technical trade press that floppy drives were no longer being routinely installed in many of the new computers being built. This fulfills a Bill Gates prophecy, made several years ago at the now defunct COMDEX computer trade show that floppy discs would soon become obsolete, and writable CDs would take their place. Bill, as usual was correct in his prediction, which may have also been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I should have known better, as Dell announced in 2003 that it was no longer installing floppy drives as standard equipment in new computers, unless explicitly requested (and paid for, up to $30 extra) by its customers, and Gateway followed suit a short time later. The floppy drive no longer appears in both desktops and notebooks, as the once huge 1.44 megs of storage now amounts to a pittance considering what has happened to file sizes since the days of DOS. We have seen the evolution of portable storage start with dinner plate sized and terribly expensive floppy discs that held a pittance compared to todays storage media, to the once universal 5.25 inch floppy that went from 180 kb as a single sided medium to the 360 kb size that marked the epitome of mass distributed soft storage. Those flexible discs were replaced by the short lived 720 kb hard cased 3.5 inch floppies, which were then in turn replaced by the newly obsolete 1.44 meg HD (high density, double sided) hard cased 3.5 inch floppies that had become ubiquitous.

We have seen technology change rapidly as the price of drives capable of slowly writing to or burning a CD disc at 1X (150kb/sec) plunged from hundreds of dollars a few years ago, to 48x (7.2 mb/sec) CD burning drives today that are now in the Sunday sale books for as little as $20. Coupled with the plunging price of CD discs, originally several dollars each, now available in spindles of 50 or 100 that are free after rebate, or selling in spindles for as little as 15 cents each without a rebate. These inexpensive CD discs, now a staple item in the sale books hold the equivalent of about 500 of the 3.5 inch HD floppy discs, for about the same price, or less then their diminutive brethren. The plunging price of CD drives has made them the standard writer of portable media now universally included in new computers, replacing the old and venerable floppy drive. Discs in the CD-RW format can be written to, and erased about as many times as a floppy could, but are many times faster, with hundreds the times the capacity, for nearly the same price. We may have all noticed the new retail boxed software rarely comes on floppies any more, but almost universally on CDs, or now even on DVDs. Bill Gates told us, back in the days of Windows 3.1 and 95 that soon Microsoft would no longer distribute software on floppies, but on the then-new CD media. He told us that one CD would replace the dozens of floppies required to install an operating system, and that the CDs would eventually become cheaper than floppies. Again, hats off to Bill for his vision of the future.

So now what do we do about the floppy-less new computer? Forget about using a floppy, and make up our minds that we will utilize the newfangled technology. With blank CD-R discs now often cheaper than floppies, they are a very viable alternative. Even the slightly more expensive and slower CD-RW discs outperform floppies by an extreme amount, and are highly portable and rugged, like their less expensive and once-writable CD-R cousins. I could install a new floppy drive in that new computer for about $15, but opening the case would void the manufacturers warranty. USB based external floppy drives, now around $35 are somewhat available, but are not very popular, with many manufacturers discontinuing them.

Another alternative is the very popular thumb drive or flash drive, a USB device commonly the size of a thumb, that can hold up to gigabytes of data. While externally most USB flash devices are somewhat similar in size and appearance, they are also now available integrated with a fine looking ball point pen, or an attractive wristwatch. Initially, Dell gave away a 16 megabyte or 32 megabyte (equivalent to about one to two dozen floppy discs) with new computers in lieu of the floppy drive, as the low price of those devices placed them in the give-away novelty category. Now, the common sizes advertised, sometimes for under $20, are the 128meg capacities, equal to more than 100 floppies, with larger capacities readily available.

Do not cry for the demise of the floppy, as technology marches along. Next on the road to obsolescence is our now popular CD, currently being replaced by the DVD. After the DVD ?



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Tulsa Computer Society 10/01/2004
Don Singleton, President