Will floppy drives become extinct?

Information Management Journal, May/Jun 2003 by Swartz, Nikki

Floppy disk drives have been the most widely used method of transferring data between computers since the dawn of the computer age, but they soon may go the way of the dinosaur.

Dell Computer recently announced it would stop making floppy disk drives standard equipment on its higher-end desktop personal computers. The No. 2 computer maker said floppy drives had been overtaken by technologies such as USB flash memory, which offers greater storage capacity, and would become an option on its Dimension 8250 models. Other Dell models may lose the floppy by year's end, depending on consumer response, said a Dell spokesman.

Today, most computer programs are too large to run or store on a manageable number of floppy drives. j Dell says its decision to eliminate the floppy drive came after focus groups indicated they were no longer necessary. Some customers said they could not even remember the last time they used a floppy.

Apple Computer stopped putting floppy drives in Macintosh computers several years ago, but other leading firms including Hewlett-Packard still offer them.