Re: Floppies

["Warren Ernst" <wernst@gmail.com>]

I write about and repair computers for a living. The demise of the
floppy can be a royal pain sometimes. When I need to diagnose a failing
hard drive, or run Ghost to backup or restore a machine, I need a
floppy drive. Yes, I can also use Optical media and USB thumbdrives
(and I do, don't get me wrong), when the fancy stuff fails I need a
floppy drive (or another computer) to make the diagnosis.

All of my PCs, including the newest fire-breathing Pentium 4, have a
floppy drive in them. One of my machines even has a 5.25" floppy drive.

And with that said, I must agree that for the average user, the Floppy
drive is kind of stupid. Floppies fail with alarming regularity, aren't
large enough to hold the multimedia files that most users want to save,
are slower than snot for directly opening and saving things like MS
Word files, and are expensive compared to the alternatives. The Thumb
Drive has turned into the modern floppy drive, and is fast, reliable,
universally portable, and large enough to hold the files people want to
move around. Burnable CDs and DVDs are large and fast enough to make a
backup of 20 GB reasonable, and external hard drives are fast, cheap,
and reliable enough for whole-system backups. And networking, the
Internet, and email attachments are what most modern users use to move
files around, which is fine with me.

So, for experts, I think a floppy is necessary. For everyone else, I
don't see why anyone would use them.

-Warr