Dell contemplates dropping 3 1/2” floppy.

Apple was the first to try this tactic, removing the floppy from all of its iMacs and eMacs, now it's dell. I personally hate the idea of dell no longer including the drive. For me floppy drives provide a feeling of security because, back when you couldn’t boot from a CD-ROM the floppy was an absolute need. Now, with the creation of the emergency repair disks or the “Damit pa, you screwed the puter up again” type disk, floppy disks aren’t needed by the vast population of home users. Anything that could once be stored on a floppy can now be emailed, zipped, burned, or uploaded much more quickly then transferring files via floppy has ever been.

The only exception to all of this is the avid computer user. I personally need to be able to take my hundred pages of documents were ever I go. I can’t wait the seven minutes for my CD-RW to write, and some of the systems I use don’t support CD-RW. I want to be able to boot my Linux installation off a single one and thirty eight hundredths megabyte diskette. When the next worm is released and email is down, I’ll need to be able to transfer documents; without a floppy how will I do this? With a floppy I can talk to the most ancient of UNIX systems, all the way up to the latest of the Apple Power PC’s. Like most people, I would have a hard time using computer systems without floppy disk technology.