Floppy disks face extinction

[~*McoreD*~]

The death knell for the humble floppy drive may have been sounded, following Dell's decision to stop installing them on all new PCs.

The Texas-based company has said it will no longer install the devices on its PCs, except as an optional extra, starting next month. Like eight-track tapes and even its 5-1/4 inch floppy cousin, the 3-1/2 inch, 1.44MB floppy disk now faces near extinction.

Analysts have said that Dell's decision is probably a precursor to a strategy that most PC makers will embark upon in the next couple of years. It has been almost five years since Apple Computer Inc stopped including floppy disk drives in Macintosh computers.

The move from Dell has been coming for some time. In 2001, the company stopped selling floppy drives on some business desktops, followed by a similar move on the Inspiron 4150 and 8200 laptop models in 2002.

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[unicorn]

Well, the 1.44 Mb floppy has lived for quite some time...
Here at my place they won't retire yet. It's a cheap little thing, extremely easy to handle, cross platform compatible and yet bootable. Then I can see that in a corporate environment the use of them is close to null, I can see myself mount them into my computers for years to come though.

[~*McoreD*~]

Any file transfer which could handle by using floppies are transferred via Email, so for me: Floppies are out of use. Unless this BIOS upgrading thing could be done without floppies I would have said this more confidently.

[KingCobra]

I think they should already be gone. As an easy replacement Flash or Compact memory cards with maybe a built in reader on the tower. I have a reader through my USB and only have a 4MB card in it for backups of my links and passwords. I really didn't think the 1.44MB disks would lasted/be installed this long in the new systems.