Apple get too much credit for killing off the floppy drive
"1998's iMac courageously did not feature a floppy drive and within the decade the vast majority of PC makers had followed suit as CD, DVD and USB storage become more prevalent."
I've always said that Apple got way too much credit for their supposed forward thinking, or for killing off the floppy drive.
You know what you saw attached to virtually every first generation, floppy-less iMac? A bloody external USB floppy disk drive in matching translucent plastic.
You know why? Because, despite the fact the 1.44MB 3.5" format was already badly dated by the late 90s, there was still no alternative that was quite cheap *and* universally-accepted enough to replace it. (#). The impetus was there to replace it, but there was no candidate yet.
That wasn't Apple's fault- what *was* their fault was the choice to leave the floppy out- and to trumpet it as a plus point!- while providing no adequate alternative.
The original iMac only included a CD reader. (Writers were falling rapidly in price towards the end of the 90s, but clearly still weren't cheap enough to be included as standard in the 1998 iMac). The modem was far from a sufficient replacement when it came to file sharing- this wasn't the broadband/Dropbox era, it was the days of dial-up 56kbps access when the other person/computer having Internet access couldn't be assumed.
Pen drives didn't even exist until couple of years later, and took a few more to be widely adopted. (If anything finally killed off the floppy it was those).
So, external floppy hanging off the side it was then.
If the original iMac deserves credit, it's with it helping give impetus to USB adoption (which I already had on my PC, but didn't have much support at first). But killing off the floppy? Nope.
(#) No, not even the Zip drive, which was hugely successful by most standards, but still not something you'd find in the majority of PCs.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
