Dell bids adieu to floppy disk drives

AUSTIN: In what may be the wave of the future, Dell Computer Corp. said goodbye to the past when it announced it would stop making floppy disk drives standard equipment on its higher end desktop personal computers.

Dell 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. The first 5.25-inch floppy drive was introduced by Shugart Associates in 1976 to be compatible with International Business Machines (IBM) Corp. mainframe computers, then made the transition to IBM's early personal computers.

Sony Corp. introduced the 3.5-inch diskette in 1980, and by the early 1990s the 3.5-inch floppy, with a capacity of 1.44 megabytes, had become the standard method of data transfer in PCs.

Tens of millions of computer users are familiar with "the a: prompt" as the symbol for the floppy diskette. 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."

Dell says the floppy will first be phased out on higher end computers because those users are more likely to be utilizing flash memory, portable hard drives, and other alternative portable storage devices.

Apple Computer Inc. stopped putting floppy drives in Macintosh computers several years ago, but other PC firms, including No. 1 personal computer maker Hewlett-Packard Co., still offer them.

© Reuters