Gavin writes:

> A common thread among these floppy device replacement discussions seems
>  to be a description that goes like:
>
>  > The [blah blah] drive  has a capacity of [blah blah] and can also
>  > read/write the 1.44 MB floppy format.
>
>  I have to ask: Who *cares* that these things can access the old 3.5" floppy
>  format?  A *good* 3.5" floppy drive seems to cost around $5 these days.
The
>  only possible argument I can see is that it saves a slot in the front of
the
>  PC, but these days this hardly seems worth the effort as most PCs seem to
>  have an unused slot, and with the advent of USB it seems that storage
> devices
>  like ZIP drives make more sense as externally connected devices anyway.
>
>  Of all the issues that affect whether a new removable storage mechanism
>  takes off or not, I would think that backwards compatibility with floppy
>  disks would run dead last behind things like drive cost, media cost, and
>  size of user base.
>
>  The IMAC and many floppy-less laptops have demonstrated that a floppy drive
>  is not an absolute necessity in these days of CD-ROM based software
>  distribution, so rather than seeing the floppy replaced by some newer
>  technology that happens to be backwards compatible, I think we'll just
>  start seeing the floppy drive fade away and be replaced by various USB
>  connected devices (including 3.5" floppies for those who need them).

Ordinarily, I agree with almost everything that Gavin says, but this time:
Nope, I couldn't disagree more.

My ideal floppy-like drive would be one that could read anything mounted in a
3.5" plastic container. It would automatically recognize the medium and the
format and then proceed to read and write to it properly without me having to
do anything more than insert the disc.

1.44MB floppies are still so overwhelmingly common as an interchange medium
that they need to be supported. My fundamental grumpiness doesn't concern the
1.44MB compatability. Rather, it occurs because a company like 3M/Imation
decided that they didn't sell enough of their previous "floptical" 21MB format
to make it worth their time to support their own format in their newest 120MB
reincarnation.

To a degree, you can say that 1.44MB has become so small that it is no longer
useful. I would wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment if it weren't for the
large stack of 1.44MB floppies on my desk and in my drawers.

More importantly though, these "large" format discs are used in a
fundamentally different way than a 1.44MB floppy. They're used for removable
storage and backup -- and if you run a significant portion of your company off
of them, and they go obsolete, you're in a heck of lot of trouble. We have
5000 pages of documentation and letters stored on our 21MB flopticals,
connected to our old Macs -- and no where to go with them. We have to keep all
of this material alive for approx. two more years until we can move it onto
the HP3000. By that time, I estimate that QueryCalc will be a sufficiently
good imitation of the desktop publishing program that we use on the Macs that
we can move all of that material on the HP3000s, into QueryCalc, where we will
have some guarantee of easy forward compatibility, regardless of the backup
medium, and finally be able to turn our 1984 Macintoshes off. But at the
moment, their absolutely critical to our business.

Wirt Atmar