was a floppy disk — a fragile circle of magnetized iron oxide on a plastic car-
rier within a bendable envelope.But back at the dawn of PC time, about 1980, the cost of a hard drive was
prohibitive — several thousand dollars for a few megabytes of storage. And
so the first versions of DOS(the disk operating systemthat preceded and still
in some ways underlies Microsoft Windows) were made to fit on a single floppy
disk to boot the system and also hold a scaled-down word processor. And then
you might store whatever files you had created on a second floppy.Within a few years, led by Apple Computers, the bendable 5.25-inch floppy
disk went away, replaced by a more durable 3.5-inch disk within a hard plas-
tic case — stilled called floppiesthough they are not nearly so; the capacity
of the smaller disk increased by leaps and bounds. Nearly all modern com-
puters standardized on a 1.44MB capacity, roughly 10 times as capacious as
the original device. (A number of attempts were made at adding 2.88MB flop-
pies, and a few supersized designs went even higher. Iomega’s Zip Drive and a
few other competitors managed to squeeze 100MB to 250MB or more on spe-
cial disks and drives that followed the same 3.5-inch form factor.)With the arrival of small hard drives for storage and CD drives or Internet
downloads to install new software, floppy drives became less important and
eventually became vestigial parts of the PC and laptop — sort of an elec-
tronic appendix. Today there is little need for a sneakernet when homes and
offices are interconnected by wireless hotspots or Ethernet cables. The emer-
gency boot function has been replaced by bootable CD drives. And anyway, it
was always a concern to knowledgeable users that a floppy disk was a great
carrier for a computer virus; if an infected disk was left in the drive and if the
machine was set up to check the floppy before it tried to load from the hard
drive, a virus could sneak into the system beforean antivirus program on the
hard drive could detect and block it.And almost every home and office with more than one machine has been
updated to include some sort of network linking them — a wired Ethernet, a
WiFi system, or a direct link between machines using a serial or USB cable.
And there is also the advent of the flash memory key,a small chip of static
RAM that plugs in to a USB port and can be walked between machines.
(More on them in Chapter 7.)The bottom line around here: On most of the machines in my office, the
floppy disk drive has not been used in years. But until fairly recently, com-
puter makers kept putting that vestigial drive into the desktops and laptops.
Today, though, has begun to see the end of the line. Many modern laptop
makers have decided to dispense with the floppy disk drive as a standard fea-
ture. In doing so, they:140 Part III: Laying Hands on the Major Parts