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Dell computer’s announcement that the number one Wintel PC maker would abandon the floppy disk recently caused a minor sensation in the PC tech press, and a flurry of “told you sos” and “what took you so longs” from the Mac gallery, Apple having dispensed with the venerable floppy disk way back in May, 1998, with the announcement of the original Bondi Blue iMac.

Floppies of course continued to be supported in desktop Mac models until the introduction of the Blue & White G3 Towers in January, 1999, and a floppy drive was also available as an optional expansion bay device in the WallStreet PowerBook until the release of the Lombard G3 a year after the iMac’s debut.

And indeed, third-party floppy drive solutions continued to be available long after that. My October, 2000, PowerBook Pismo has a VST SuperDisk expansion bay module that supports floppies, although I must confess that I’ve never mounted a floppy in my Pismo in 16 months of ownership.

I do still use floppies occasionally in my daughter’s elderly PowerBooks, and in my wife’s in ancient LC-520. My UMAX S-900 also has a floppy drive that gets used once in a while for file transfers with the other older Macs, or for diagnostic booting with an OS 8.1 Disk Tools floppy (remember them?).

I’ve never been a floppy hater. I used to use them a lot, for software and file backups, for file transfers, and for sending digital copy to editors in the days before I had in Internet hookup. I still have maybe 100 or 150 floppies full of data, some of it written a decade ago, and I have a had any of this archived stuff go bad yet, although anything really important is backed up to other, more stable archive media.

For that matter, the even older 5 1/4 inch floppy disks I used in my pre-computer Wang word processor seem to be holding up as well. I would love to be able to get rid of the Wang, which is enormous, but there’s the matter of nearly two years worth of work stored on those 5 1/4 inch floppies in Wangwriter II format, which have defied the efforts of several more tech-savvy people then I to somehow translate to Mac or even DOS format. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a professional outfit somewhere that could do this, but the aforementioned information on them isn’t really valuable enough to spend money on salvaging -- just convenient to have available once in awhile.

For example, I fired up the old Wang last weekend to print out (it has a pretty good, albeit very slow daisy wheel printer-- remember them?) copies of a couple of articles I wrote back in 1992, which saved me a considerable amount of research time.

Of course, someday those old floppies are going to bite the dust. The Wang boots from a 5 1/4 inch floppy system disk as well, so the end the road will come, probably before I run out of carbon printer ribbons.

Backwards compatibility, or lack of it, is one of the most baneful aspects of the computer era, along with its evil twin, rapid obsolescence. Remember SyQuest removable media drives? They were once the industry standard, but the company went belly-up. Or how about EZFlyer, the consumer SyQuest product intended to try and compete with Iomega’s Zip drive? It disappeared from the marketplace too of course with SyQuest’s demise, but I’ll bet there are lots of folks with data stored on aging SyQuest and EZFlyer media. 3M/Imation’s SuperDisk (not to be confused with Apple’s DVD-burning SuperDrive) is another removable media format that was a less than roaring market success, partly because of performance shortcomings -- it is dog-slow -- even though the SuperDisk’s aforementioned floppy support capability was supposed to be its ace in the hole.

Iomega’s Zip has fared a lot better, thanks to being faster, as well as the company developing media capacity of upgrades that didn’t obsolete older media. I recall that my 100 MB SCSI Zip drive seemed like pretty cool stuff back in 1997 when I first bought it. At that time, two Zip disks could hold more than the capacity of my desktop Mac’s hard drive, and five Zips matched the hard drive storage of my PowerBook 5300.

The Zip drive meant no more backing up files to floppies, and I still have about a dozen full Zip disks in storage. The SCSI Zip drive won’t connect to either of my production Macs today (I guess it could with an adapter, but I don’t have one), but I have a Zip expansion bay module for the Pismo, and the old SCSI drive still gets some use with the fleet of older Macs in the family. It’s even bootable.

Commendably, Iomega has maintained backward compatibility for the original 100 MB Zip disks to this day. They even still sell a 100 MB only Zip drive, although in USB interface only -- no more SCSI.

The Zip 100MB USB Powered drive supports Mac OS 8.5.1 through OS X, and sells for a modest $69.99. There is also a Zip 100MB ATAPI drive for internal installation in desktop computers that supports that Power Mac G4/G3 (blue & white G3 only) towers with Mac OS 8.5 through OS X. System requirements include an available 3.5” or 5.25” drive bay and IDE controller with a free connection.

SCSI support isn’t completely gone, however. There is a Zip 250MB SCSI external drive that supports Mac OS 8.6 through OS X on machines with a with 25-pin SCSI port or PCI card adapter. The Zip 250MB USB bus powered drive supports Mac OS 8.5.1 through OS X.

Rounding out the Mac compatible 250 MHz Zip drive line is the Zip 250MB ATAPI internal drive for Power Mac G4/G3 (blue & white G3 only) with Mac OS 8.5 through OS X.

The current top of the line in Zip drives are Zip 750MB USB (including USB 2.0 ) and FireWire external drives, which about match burnable CDs in capacity when formatted.

The USB version requires a Macintosh computer with built-in USB connection running Mac OS 8.6 - 9.x (USB 1.x) or Mac OS X, 10.1 and greater (USB 1.1). The FireWire unit wants a Macintosh computer with built-in FireWire/1394 support running Mac OS 8.6 - 9.x or Mac OS X, 10.1 and greater. For more information, visit: http://www.iomega.com

The Zip 100 MB and 250 MB disks were fairly logical successors to the old 1.4 MB floppy, but it’s still impossible to beat the economy and convenience of the floppy disk for quick transfers of small files, especially if they need to be sent away. Floppies are cheap enough to be in essentially expendable. But that sort of thing isn’t needed very often any more thanks to the Internet, which was really a big part of the replacement for floppy disks along with other storage media formats.

Now there are burnable and rewritable CDs and DVDs, which can’t be beat (at least so far) on cost/storage capacity ratio. They are also (at least supposedly) a more stable archive medium, although the proof of that remains to be seen several years down the road.

However, aside from their cheapness and voluminous capacity, I don’t really like CDs much as a writable data storage medium. I prefer the flexibility of magnetic storage media, which allows you to edit and change content in small increments instead of doing a complete rewrite, or discarding and starting anew. That 750 MB Zip suits my tastes a lot better, although I don’t have one.

I do have a 16 X 10 X 40 CD burner, but I don’t use it a whole lot. I find the necessity of messing around with support software too much of a hassle, and will usually opt for another solution if it’s at all practical. I just don’t like the setup time and waiting. I’ve settled on using other hard drives for data back up, and I love my little QPS M2 FireWire drive for this purpose.

Hard drives are no panacea of bulletproof reliability however. The original 6 GB Fujitsu 2.5 in. hard drive in the M2 croaked with no warning last summer, at relatively low hours of use, fortunately not taking anything of vital importance with it. I keep a second set of file backups on another computer. I replaced the 6 MB drive with the 10 GB Toshiba unit pulled from my dead WallStreet PowerBook (last summer was my worst-ever season for hardware failures), and was back in business. Another nice thing about hard drives, it is that they can be accessed through several different interface options. If something happened to the M2 enclosure, I could take the drive out and stick it in a PowerBook, an expansion bay module, or another hard drive enclosure (USB or SCSI as well as FireWire).

Another alternaative to the functions once filled by the old floppy are the little USB drives that plug into your computer’s USB port. I haven;t experimented with these yet, but they seem pretty cool.

The CD, however, is the current king of the hill in removable Media, and has the happy facility of being supported by DVD drives as well. I’m guessing that we can expect the CD to gradually displaced the DVD in popularity, but CD backward compatibility seems to be assured for the foreseeable future thanks to its ubiquity.

Alas, or happily, depending upon your point of view in these matters, even the DVD will likely be displaced by something newer, bigger, and perhaps cheaper before the decade is out. Organic or plasma data storage perhaps? That’s a mighty long way from the old 360k capacity of those 5 1/4 inch floppies on the old Wang!

Charles W. Moore

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