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).

G.