The Floppy and the Floppy Drive Are Dead! Long Live the Floppy!

I spent a bit of time running back and forth between two machines, this last week, updating drivers on one with files downloaded from the Internet to another. I used floppy disks and it went very well, thank you.

There is still no handy medium for such transfers that can replace the humble floppy disk, in my opinion. CD's won't do it. There is too much time involved in making one for a small and simple transfer. Zip drives are out because almost no one ever had one and those that did have long since discarded them.

The relentless downward price pressure on builders of computers has driven them to remove floppy drives from machines. The advent of bootable CDs has long ago made this possible and the builders of systems are simply bowing to price pressure by taking them out. It's worth noting, though, that the most requested upgrade to new PCs I encounter is to add a floppy drive. Many new mainboards don't have a floppy controller built in, so this is sometimes a challenge and I have yet to find a truly satisfying solution for those machines. However, the users have spoken and the floppy lives!

Jack