Yahoo! News Story - Floppy Disk Becoming Relic of the Past (fwd)

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Mon Sep 20 07:44:09 2004

At 11:44 PM 9/19/2004, Roger Merchberger wrote:
>>The serial port _is_ disappearing. I am concerned. [...]
>>USB-to-serial dongles are
>>_not_ a seamless solution. The two arenas this is cropping up are
>>modern Macs and modern laptops. While these devices are not covered
>>under the 10-year umbrella, they will be at some point, and when they
>>are, they will _not_ have native serial ports and there will be many
>>things that we do with ease now, with 5-year-old machines that we be
>>hard five years from now.
>
>Some are better than others, but you are right - they are rarely a "seamless" solution by any means. I have a belkin adapter that so far has done everything I ask of it - Winders & Linux.

I recently tried a Belkin USB-to-serial and a second brand (Amb-something)
on my Win2000 box in hopes of delivering an extra serial port for
my old Palm III. No go! Both blue-screened when Palm Desktop
tried to access the serial port. I suspect that either my motherboard
USB is blown or the drivers didn't like a dual-processor machine.

There are PCMCIA to serial adapters, no? And we'll be able to
insert PCI serial cards as long as PCI is around.

But I'd love to have a USB-to-floppy connection, too. And we'd all
love it if it was 8", 5 1/4", 3 1/2" and 2" compatible. :-)

- John
Received on Mon Sep 20 2004 - 07:44:09 BST

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