Apple got too much credit for forcing their users to buy external floppies...
"Who dumped the Floppy and got laughed at, then everyone else drops the floppy ?"
As I've already said...
"Is this the same iMac that everyone who owned one rushed out and bought a transparent-plastic-clad external floppy drive for? I do believe that it is!
Remember that the first iMac only included a CD *reader*. CD writers were still a couple of years from being cheap enough to be a realistic "base" option at this point, and dirt-cheap pen drives were even further off. The only built-in way of sharing information was via a dial-up Internet connection. The fact that the iMac was a major success doesn't change the fact that leaving out the floppy without a practical alternative in place was jumping the gun."
It's certainly true that the capacity of the 1.44 MB floppy disk was *already* getting badly out of sync with user needs at a time when typical hard drives were already several gigabytes in size and increasing rapidly, and even the CD-ROMs that were by then commonplace could hold several hundred megabytes.
The only reason it hadn't been replaced is that there was no universally-accepted alternative at a near-enough "base" price (even the now-notorious but once-popular Zip drives didn't quite get there). Regardless, the motivation for a true replacement to the floppy was clearly there, with or without the iMac.
Apple may deserve some credit for pushing USB along- its time *had* arguably arrived by that point, and it was already in many PCs, it just wasn't that well-supported.
But credit for *not* doing something- i.e. missing out the floppy- and providing no real alternative (not even a writable CD)? I don't think so.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
