Apple Has Blood on Its Hands: The Floppy Disk is Dead
(Image courtesy of TUAW)In these heady days of cloud computing and inexpensive gigabytes of data storage, it’s hard to remember how we all survived with floppy disks -- especially now that Sony has announced they’re killing them.TUAW has an interesting look back on the floppy disk, and Apple’s part in eventually killing the diminutive storage media. Sony recently announced that they are killing the 1.44MB storage device as of next year, which probably comes as a surprise to many people who might not have even realized they still existed in 2010.The writing was on the wall for the floppy disk in 1997, when Apple released the original all-in-one Bondi blue iMac, complete with a new port called USB. At the time, the iMac was more noteworthy to some for its complete absence of a floppy disk drive, which prior to that date had been standard on all Macs. Apple chose to outfit the device with only a CD-ROM drive, and the critics were fierce in the company’s decision to leave out the floppy.Of course, the decision was a boon for third-party vendors, who filled the gap with external USB floppy drives aplenty. But the writing was clearly on the wall: Apple made their decision and never looked back.As TUAW notes, most Microsoft Word documents these days wouldn’t even fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk, and with so many methods for transferring files between systems that don’t even involve media to begin with -- MobileMe, Dropbox, Google Docs, you name it -- how long will it be before even the optical disc goes the way of the floppy?“So, what have we learned?” TUAW writer Michael Grothaus concludes. “Steve [Jobs] was ridiculed for leaving the floppy off the iMac because he saw it as archaic. Now he gets to say, ‘I told you so.’ If Steve does have the power to gaze into the tech future, Adobe should be worried about Flash going the way of the floppy.”Ouch.
http://www.maclife.com/article/news/apple_has_blood_its_hands_floppy_disk_dead
