RIP Floppy disks

[velocityg4]

Well $99 bucks is very costly given even back then floppy drives for PC you could get for around $20-30. It was a huge apple premium for a basic floppy drive. The drives never got that high in cost as the technology to read and write floppy drives was pretty old tech even by then.

The $99 is an example of an Apple Tax.

You numbers for the cost an ink jet printer are pretty far off as well because lets see my parents bought a color ink jet in 1996-97 for about 70 bucks.

As I recall those USB floppy drives also did not support 400K and 800K discs.

 

[rhett7660]

The next thing to go will be the good ol' compact disc.

I think it still has some life in it. Not going anywhere anytime soon. Just an opinion not based on any facts or pie charts!

 

[bobbytomorow]

Man, talk about staying power. Although I can't remember using one in the past decade or so.

 

[johnhw]

How could I back-up iTunes now?

 

[xUKHCx]

A good read on the subject

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8646699.stm

...

Every year another computer manufacturer stops putting floppy drives in its machines, or a retailer stops selling the disks. Each time the cry goes up that the death knell has been sounded for the floppy disk.

However, Verbatim, a UK manufacturer which makes more than a quarter of the floppies sold in the UK, says it sells hundreds of thousands of them a month. It sells millions more in Europe.

"It's 14 years we've been discussing the death of the floppy, since CD technology first started coming on strong," says Verbatim spokesman Kevin Jefcoate.

...

 

[OllyW]

Interesting to read this.

I've just finished converting a few old HD floppies to DD for our CNC Wire EDM machine.

It can't scale to the dizzy heights of 1.44MB, 720KB is more than enough.