the new Apple iMac

From: Doug Yowza <yowza_at_yowza.com>
Date: Thu May 7 21:50:32 1998

On Thu, 7 May 1998, Allison J Parent wrote:

> Further, I'm working on a z280 design and am seriously considering
> no floppy. Why? Eats power and space for intermittent use at best.
> I'd rather use a utility I wrote years ago to transfer files via
> serial port (back when no two machines had the same format or size
> floppy). I even intend to put the whole OS and then some in EEprom
> as it's cheaper and faster that floppy or hard disk.

Many subnotebooks took this route by making the floppy an external add-on.
The HP OmniBook 300 had no provision for a floppy other than a third-party
device that hung off the parallel port. The Compaq Aero and Toshiba
Libretto took the PCMCIA floppy approach. My favorite was the DEC Ultra,
which put the floppy in a snap-on wedge that went under the laptop, so you
could leave it connected without the headache of a floppy drive dangling
from a cable that the other approaches had.

But I remember one computer from the early 80's (don't remember the name),
where the floppy was the computer -- a small SBC mounted on top of the
floppy, and that's all there was.
 
-- Doug
Received on Thu May 07 1998 - 21:50:32 BST