floppy standardization (was: Re: [ox-en] Welcome)
- From: "Timm Murray"<hardburn runbox.com>
- Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 15:10:27 GMT
<>
The answer that I give to myself is
o that a CD is a highly standardized mass product (like paper
or drinking water) and
o that CDs are manufactured by several competing companies
(this might explain why Iomega ZIP disks are so expensive).
So, if free cars will be more like CDs than ZIP disks, they will
only cost 1/10th of what the cost today.
I am constantly surprised by the fact that I am still using a klunky, small floppy disk.
Over the past ten years, I have gone from a 40 MB hard drive up to a 40 GB hard drive,
but I'm still using the same 1.44 MB floppy drive that I was back then?!!
Iomega has an intresting history (I promise not to rant on about it like I did with IBM :).
They went through a huge pile of crappy, propreity replacements for the old floppy disks.
I don't know what it was that made ZIP disks stick (perhaps it was that their marketting
department emphisised their portability, especially with the early serial models), but all
the other Iomega "standards" failed miserably.
Now ZIP disks are quite popular, and most of my college's computers have the ZIP drives,
so I back-up a lot of my homework from the floppy disks "just in case". However, we will
not see the death of the floppy drive (Steve Jobs, listening?) until there is a good, open
standard to replace it. CD-RWs/DVD-RWs just aren't good enough because they are too
clunky to be used for anything less than a few, very large files that are burned all at once.
So, we can either get Iomega to open up the ZIP standard (good luck), or come up with
something totally new. Actually, Iomega might be willing to open up the older 100 MB
standard and keep the 250 MB versions to itself. That's good enough for me.
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