Tuesday 11 May 2004

Pic of the day: Those are definitely not floppy drives.

Floppies

My newest computer doesn't have a floppy disk drive. I understand those are out now. Their time has come and gone. Of course, it is quite some years since floppies were actually floppy. I still have some 5.25 inch floppies lying around, some of them no doubt containing unique fiction which I never got around to print out or copy. (Or delete!) I still have a computer at work with both 5.25 inch and 3.5 inch drives, but I don't have any of them at home anymore. And now the 3.5 inch floppies are also marching towards extinction.

Usually I don't think much about it. I have so many fun things to do, I don't spend much time going through my old floppies. Most software these days comes on CDs, although I download more and more from the Net directly. That's the way software is going: Pay with credit card, download immediately. No floppies required, or even welcome. These days, a floppy cannot even hold a savegame... not to mention that many games don't have local saves anymore.

Then again, every time I want to upload a photo from my digital camera, I go into the bedroom and connect the camera to the old computer that stands there. I transfer the image using a serial cable, resize it with the camera software, and upload it to my web site. Then I go back to the living room and download the image file so I have a local copy to go along with the text which I write (or dictate, as I do today) here. While getting up from the chair once in a while is good for your health, the real reason is that the camera control software came on a floppy disk, so I haven't installed it on this computer. Now that I think about it, I could of course transferred the software from the floppy disk to my hypermodern USB memory stick. But then I would have no excuse to buy an external USB floppy disk drive. And I suppose if I want to buy that, I will have to do so while they still exist, while people still remember the Age of Floppies.

Then again, I could get a new and much better digital camera, and they all come with small memory chips that you can pull out and put into a corresponding slot on the computer. My new computer has such a slot, or possibly two... there are four small openings and I only know one of them, the one that corresponds to the memory card on my handheld computers. I'm pretty sure two of the others are for digital cameras. But my camera works quite fine. Actually, everything works quite fine so I really have no excuse to spend more money on computer equipment right now. Well, there is the video card, but that's a story for another day, if any.