Did the dad thing today. Picked up the kid after school. Took him to McDonald’s. Got the usual. Kid’s Cheeseburger Happy Meal, no onions, Red Flash. "Will that be for a boy or girl?" the attendant asked. "Boy," I said.
Pulled up to the first window, paid, pulled up to the second window and got the food, which I handed to the kid in the back. The smell of French fries hung in the air between us. "What kind of toy are they giving away these days?" I asked. I heard the rustle of paper and then a long pause. "Dunno," the kid said, "here."
I reached back for it and brought it into view. And there, inside a sealed, plastic bag - was a shiny 3.5" floppy drive.
Well, it hasn’t quite come to that, but it may be just around the bend. In early February, Dell Computer announced that it would discontinue the venerable floppy drive in its Dimension line of consumer desktop PCs, unless the customer specifically orders one. Apple first pulled the plug on the floppy back in August of 1998, with the introduction of the iMac.
It shouldn’t be missed over here in the Wintel world, either. With its meager 1.44MB capacity, it’s long been an anachronism in an exploding era of ever larger files. Much like buying a new SUV only to find an old fashioned engine crank under the front seat. Back in the old days, Mac programmers could cram an entire program onto a single floppy, ditto AOL coders. Nowadays, you’d be lucky to fit a day’s worth of spam onto one.
In any event, it’s been a remarkable run for what really isn’t a floppy disk at all. "Floppy" was the description originally applied to its predecessors, the removable 8 and 5.25" recordable disks. All three formats were similar in that the read/write medium consisted of a disk of mylar coated with a magnetic oxide. But the bigger disks were sheathed in a thin, flexible plastic cover that gave rise to the name "floppy." "Flimsy" would have been equally descriptive, but might have scared off customers. Although the smaller sibling came in a thicker, rigid case, the floppy soubriquet stuck.
Sony seems to have come up with the non-floppy floppy first, in or around 1980, but best as I can determine it was another three, four, or maybe even five years before the 3.5" drive and disk became commonplace on computers. In May of 1983, Sony introduced an improved double-sided, double-density version of same, capable of holding up to a megabyte of data, later increased to the 1.44 MB we all know so well.
Along came the fixed hard and compact disk drives, and still the floppy refused to fold. For one thing, it was portable whereas the other two media weren’t - or at least not then. The next floppy killer was supposed to be Iomega’s Zip drive, introduced in late 1994 in 25 and 100 MB capacities. Vampire-like, the venerable floppy hung on. Even with the more recent advent of portable hard drives, rewritable CDs, and recordable DVDs, the now ancient floppy persists in sticking around, for reasons no one can readily discern.
Sure, you can stick it in a shirt pocket. Trouble is, you can’t stick much on it to begin with, not in this age of massive music and video clips.
Despite their decision to try to phase it out, even Dell seems perplexed by the floppy’s persistency. While their research reveals that nine out of ten customers want one, few admit to actually using them. And Hewlett Packard, last year’s No. 1 PC seller, plans to continue bundling the little floppy who could and did survive this long, despite Dell’s pronouncement.
Both vendors would like to see consumers move onto something else more modern, such as the latest floppy-killer candidate, USB flash memory drives. The latter are PC and Mac compatible, and small enough to double, in some cases, as key chains. Plug them into a USB port in your laptop or desktop machine and they simply show up as another drive. Unlike floppies, and even CDs, they’re immune to nicks, scratches and the usual wear and tear associated with a high-speed, revolving medium, and the drives themselves have no moving parts to fail. Plus, try plugging a floppy or CD drive into a digital camera.
The downside to the consumer, if there is one, is that prices aren’t likely to plummet anytime soon, although you’ll get increasing amounts of storage for the same buck. The low end of USB flash drives has already migrated from 8MB to 16MB, while the upper end now extends to a gigabyte.
Sales of the USB drives last year totaled 2.3 million units and brought in $104 million in income. Conservative estimates see sales of 46.3 million units worth $3.8 billion by the year 2006.
The floppy has had an unusually successful run, but it’s time to say farewell and move onward. The future of storage is smaller and faster.
Dennis Stacy is a San Antonio writer. Email him at dstacy@texas.net.
