DELL COMPUTER CORP. Floppy drives to go the way of eight-tracks

Dell is starting to remove floppy drives on desktops.
ROUND ROCK, Texas (AP) -- Like vinyl records and eight-track tapes, floppy drives are slowly succumbing to the march of technology.
Dell Computer Corp., one of the world's largest computer makers, said Wednesday it will stop putting the drives in its desktop computers next month and offer them only as an option.
Newer storage devices can hold far more data, at a competitive price, spelling likely extinction for the floppy.
"What Dell has done, I expect every major vendor to do in the next 12 months," said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a technology consulting firm in San Jose, Calif.
Newer technology
Floppy disks, the square 3-1/2-inch plastic device that stores 1.44-megabytes of information, have lost their allure for many people who have evolved to newer, larger-capacity technology.
Floppy disks long ago ceded their turf as the delivery medium for software -- CD ROMs and the Internet now handle that task. And many people find a 1.44 MB disk too puny to handle the daily data of a digital life -- photos, MP3 files, e-mail records.
Rewriteable CDs, ZIP drives and portable hard drives -- especially keychain-size flash memory devices -- have established themselves as far more useful.
Dell brand 16-megabyte USB flash memory drives will be offered standard in Dimension's high-end model first and the company will consider making it available on all desktops depending on customer response, Dell spokesman Lionel Menchaca said. The keychain-sized USB drives will cost the same as floppy drives, he said.
USB drives are considered "plug-and-go" because they plug into computers and software is easily installed.
Persuading some desktop users to drop the floppy could be a challenge, which is why Dell is moving slowly, Menchaca said. The company no longer provides floppy drives on standard notebook computers.