As
programs and data
take up more space, days of the humble floppy disk are numbered
by Alan Zisman (c) 1995 First published
in Business in Vancouver
, Issue #309 September 19, 1995 High Tech Office
column
Let's take
a moment
to think of the floppy disk and drive in your computer. It is perhaps
the part of the machine that's had the least change over the past
decade or so, but in the early days of personal computing, it wasn't
even there.
The
primeval Altair,
which emerged from the swamp 20 years ago, is often thought of as
the first PC, and is best remembered as the thing that motivated Bill
Gates to quit Harvard to start a software company. That software
was stored as holes in easily-torn paper tape, and was soon replaced
by more durable audio cassette tapes, used by popular machines like
the Commodore VIC-20.
Apple
founder Steve Wozniak found fame and fortune in the late '70s
by getting a floppy disk to run on the original Apple II. That made
it easy to load software quickly and store data conveniently. Add a
popular business application like the original VisiCalc
program, and there was the takeoff point for a multibillion-dollar
industry.
More
convenient 3-1/2"
floppies started replacing the larger, old-style 5-1/4" disks when
they were provided as standard issue on the 1984 Apple Macintosh.
By 1988, both Macs and IBM PS/2s used these disks, enhanced
to hold about a meg-and-a-half of programs or data.
At the
time, it seemed
like you could fit a lot on one of those disks, which had about the
same capacity as eight of the 160-kb floppies that were an added-price
extra with the original 1981 IBM PC. But now, years after they became
commonplace, users can get a severe case of tennis elbow loading
software
shipped on so-called high-density diskettes. Get a copy of IBM's WARP
on floppies, and you'll find 21 disks to install the operating system.
And inside the box are another 14 floppies for the bonus-pack software.
That's one
of the big
reasons for the upsurge in popularity of CD-ROM players: it's a lot
easier to put one gold disc in the drive, click on the Setup icon,
and go get a cup of coffee. And floppies can be damaged: just ask
one of the thousands of people who bought Windows 95 on floppies only
to discover the package was unusable, because of a flawed Disk 2.
CD-ROMs
are definitely
more convenient, but they too have a drawback--you can't use them
to store data or back up your hard drives. A couple of years ago, Tandy/Radio
Shack announced a product called Thor that
it claimed would soon bring affordable, writable CD-ROM drives to
the mass market. But after a flurry of hype, the project seems to have
disappeared.
Drives
that allow users
to create their own CDs still haven't dipped below the $1,000 mark,
and remain too expensive for most users. Besides, what you've written
on a CD is permanent, unlike the data on floppies, which can be erased
and rewritten.
There have
been a number
of technologies offering removable mass-storage on high-capacity disks
of one sort or another. Syquest has a series of cartridge
drives,
particularly popular among Mac users and desktop publishers who have
to transport multi-meg files for high-resolution printing at a service
bureau. But high cost, among other problems, has kept this from
becoming
a true mass standard. Recently, I tested another alternative--the
HardPac, a magneto-optical drive. The small, removable 250-meg
cartridges,
in a drive the size of a small paperback, have a lot to recommend
them, but not at $1,700 for the drive and $90 per disk.
But
suddenly, after
more than a decade of relying on increasingly inadequate floppy disks,
the situation has started to change. Last fall, Iomega, a
company
with more than a decade of experience marketing removable Bernoulli
drives, introduced the ZIP drive to the PC and Mac markets, and has
been unable to meet the demand for the product since. The ZIP, which
lists for US$199, is a tiny, external drive that takes disks a little
larger than the common 3-1/2" floppies. But instead of holding a meg
or so, ZIP disks hold 100 megs. Even at their list price of US$20 each,
they offer good value and performance. And the drives plug into a Mac's
SCSI port, or even into a PC's printer port, making them portable
enough to go anywhere.
Rival
Syquest has bounced
back with a competitive product that packs about 130 megs onto a disk
(unfortunately not compatible with the ZIP disk). And lurking in the
near future is Iomega's JAZ, a US$599 drive promising a massive one
gigabyte (1,000 megs) on a single, relatively affordable removable
disk.
None of these
products
is anywhere near as universal as the lowly floppy diskette, but it
seems probable that one or another of them will be adopted by the
market as the new standard way for storing data, shipping software
and backing up hard drives. And given their low cost and easy
installation,
you don't have to wait for your next computer to get one