X-no-Archive:yes
Like John Krussel, Robert Schlosser, and Lane Rollins, I had also seen
diskettes with 2.0 MB stamped on the plastic shell; this was years ago, on
IBM-branded diskettes, IIRC.

And, IIRC, when the 1.44 diskettes crossed over from Macintosh to the PC
(albeit with different formatting), hard drives were, what? about 40MB? One
could reasonably backup a PC to maybe two boxes of diskettes. And we could
copy files to diskette, and reasonably expect that anyone else's PCs had
such a drive, with occasional disappointment. Now, there is no read-write
removable media available everywhere that can reasonably hold every day work
files or that I would want to use to back up all of my data, let alone use
for a full backup of my entire hard drive. Tape is cheap, but tape drives
are not everywhere I want to be.

Now, the situation is so uncertain, that the iMac has no read-write
removable media (although the PC's 1.44 may not be that much better than
nothing). And even if it did, what would make sense for that media (avoiding
the question of whether some form of internetworking is the 'right' answer
for accessing files between machines)? I understand that CD-R or RW is not
readable on older CD drives. DVD does not yet have a standard RW format.

Are the current USB devices the answer, and we are expected to tote the
drive and cables with us? I'm uncomfortable even having the same devices on
various PCs, because, like Wirt, I don't want to find that I have an
investment in a "wave of the future" media whose day has past all too soon.
I think that too many of us have seen this kind of thing with tapes. And,
the IBM microdrives (30GB?) and upcoming nanodrives are going to bring
sky-rocketing capacities that will similarly dwarf the 1## - 2##MB devices.

I find this problem interesting; while I don't get all of the major trade
publications, so may have missed good articles on this, I haven't seen one
in the magazines that I do get.

-----Original Message-----
From: Wirt Atmar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 1999 1:19 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Off Topic: 2MB Floppy
<snip>
We bought into the 21MB floptical format about eight years ago to back up
our
Macs. Discs for the "wave of the future" aren't even manufactured any more,
although once they were made and commonly advertised by Sony, 3M, and
others.
We still use the flopticals, but very carefully nowadays.

Wirt Atmar