Friday, February 7, 2003
Dell Computer said floppy drives had been overtaken by technologies offering greater storage capacity and would become an option on its Dimension 8250 models.
Other Dell models may lose the floppy by end of the year, depending on customer response, Dell spokesman Lionel Menchaca said.
He said the decision was made because technologies such as USB flash memory offer much more storage capacity than floppies and are more useful with today's mega-memory computers.
"You insert it right into the USB port, and your computer reads it just like it would read a floppy drive. The benefit is, you've got much more capacity -- instead of just 1.44 megabytes, at the low end you have 16 megabytes."
The floppy drive has been the most widely used method of transferring data between computers since the dawn of the computer age.
In the early days of computing, hard drives of 10 to 20 megabytes, the capacity of a few floppy disks, were common, and the size of computer programs was often small enough to fit on one or two floppies.
But even today's less expensive computers include hard drives one hundred times larger, and most programs are too large to run or store on a manageable number of floppy drives.
Menchaca said the decision to eliminate the floppy drive came following focus group research with customers.
"When we would ask the question to people 'do you need a floppy,' the answer to that question would be yes," he said.
"But when we asked them how long it had been since they used it, they would say six months, a year. Many couldn't remember the last time they used the floppy drive."
By: DocMemory
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