We moan that the IT industry foists new technologies upon us not because we want or need them, but because it wants to make more money. Yet on nearly every PC in your organisation - and on the planet for that matter - is a device that proves the very opposite trend. I'm talking about the humble floppy disk drive.
My eye was drawn to this by Dell's announcement that is going to offer a no-cost alternative to the floppy in the form of a USB memory key on a few of its notebooks PCs. About time too we might say. Yet the fact that this was newsworthy at all is significant.
Dell's 16MB solid-state alternative to the 1.44MB floppy will work on any machine with a USB port. But Dell is sufficiently nervous about the appeal of this feature to offer it only on a couple of its laptops. Even more tellingly, it is not offered at all on desktop PCs, where, the company believes, buyers continue to expect a floppy disk drive.
They are probably right too - we do expect a floppy in our PC. In every large company that I visit, the vast majority of PCs still have standard floppy disk drives, which have probably not copied a disk in years.
Low density
But why the fixation with a low-density storage medium which is not very good at long-term storage anyway? The 1.44MB floppy first saw service in the IBM PS/2. The PS/2 was not a PlayStation but IBM's second-generation personal computer, launched in 1987. At the time the processor choice on the PS/2 was an 8MHz 8086 through to a 16MHz 80386, graphics were VGA at 640x480 pixels, and the maximum memory possible was 16MB - typically 1MB or 2MB was standard.
Today's processors are 200 to 350 times faster, standard memory is 100 times larger, graphics resolutions are four times as high and are accompanied by 3D graphics processors far more powerful than the PS/2's most powerful CPU. But one thing remains the same --that absurd 1.44MB floppy disk drive...
There have been technical solutions that would have improved the capacity of removable media in the intervening years. But none has stuck because this was an area where total standardisation and interoperability always remained essential.
But perhaps we've finally reached a point where the floppy drive should be abandoned - thanks to changes to PC architecture. That's the key to Dell's decision. Dell isn't a technological leader. It simply recognises that USB, in its USB 2.0 format, has finally achieved the status of a de-facto standard on the PC. Once you've accepted that and can assume that all PCs will have a USB port, you can use it in place of the slot on the floppy disk drive.
Of course this move is largely unnecessary since we are all now networked and have Internet access. But there is sometimes a human need to hold in our hands things that are important to us. It's the very essence of personal computing, and you won't stamp it out.
For example, if you are doing a talk at a trade show, you will probably email your presentation to the organiser. And maybe you'll send a copy to a Hotmail account. You'll also put it on your laptop of course, but I bet you'll carry a PowerPoint backup on a floppy or two, just in case those other things go wrong. There's peace of mind in holding something in your hand, and this is why an outdated, inadequate storage format has survived.
Until now that is...
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