Last week, I wrote about the Type C connector for USB, ThunderBolt, and other things being encouraging. The tech news media has been publishing article after article about how it's doom and gloom and about the fact that the market for peripherals is currently relatively nascent, and the standards are still evolving.
Near the end of that piece, I compared it to a previous big transition that Apple kick-started and forced: the removal of 3.5-inch floppy diskettes from computers. We've been discussing the issue in #68kMLA on irc.oshaberi.ne.jp on and off for a few weeks and I think it's worth writing something about it here.
Before their removal from computers, floppy diskette drives were essentially the baseline storage media. 3.5-inch, 1.44 megabyte drives had been common since the late 1980s on Macintosh as well as x86 "PC" platforms, and were available as upgrades to many other types of systems, although often at great expense. Early on, 3.5-inch diskettes were a huge improvement on the 5.25-inch media they replaced, and for years, they were considered enough. Until the mid-late 1990s, most (if not all) software (outside of CD-ROM specific multimedia titles) was available on them, and they were the most common way to transfer data or make backups of a computer.
I believe the removal of the floppy diskette (and in general, the market's failure to develop and implement a viable replacement before then) was much more damaging to computer users (financially and operationally) than the change to the USB Type C connector has been.
There are a lot of reasons for the failure to develop a new standard. I think a lot of it is basically a failure to recognize the floppy connector could or should be a generic thing. Serial connections on Macs were almost never used for storage, and although PC Parallel ports were used for various types of storage, it was nearly never particularly fast. Even if the controller could be adapted for use with newer drives, no newer drives were ever developed for Apple's floppy controller. (Notably, in the 1980s, there was a 20-megabyte external hard disk available for the port, but it only worked on certain early Macs.)
On the PC side of things, lack of a more universal and faster connector (HP-IB, aka IEE-488 has been suggested, because it was fast-ish, cheap-ish, and allowed for multiple devices to be connected) compelling for storage. SCSI wasn't common on PCs, mainly because it was difficult to set up and because it was expensive.
Several vendors floated ideas for replacements: IBM was playing with 2.88 megabyte drives and diskettes on its own PS/2 and ThinkPad computers, and Sony developed the MiniDisc and MD Data (140MB) format in part to be used as a data drive, and floptical technology allowed for 21 megabyte cartridges in a similar footprint to 3.5-inch diskettes. Later in the '90s, there were other formats such as SuperDisk/LS-120, Zip 100-250-750, but I don't have information on which of these were intended to try to supersede the floppy disk as a standard, and how many were available as an expansion system, the way that EZ-135 and bigger systems such as Bernoulli, Jaz, Orb, and SyJet were.
For a superfloppy format to become standard, PC OEMs and Apple would need to bundle the drives (at least) with systems, ship software on it, and it would need to be or quickly become very inexpensive, and also easy to add to existing computers. Unfortunately, none of these systems ever met those criteria. Zip 100 was probably the closest to do. Unlike the Ditto, Iomega never built a version for the PC floppy connector, but parallel port and IDE/ATAPI versions allowed inexpensive options for PC, internal and external versions for Macs were common, Iomega was among the first to release USB storage devices with the Zip 100, and by the end of the '90s, Apple was in the regular habit of making several of its computers available with internal Zip drives. PowerBook accessory manufacturers also built versions of the drive to be installed into Apple's laptops.
We had a Zip 100 drive attached our PC at home, and when dad got tired of the parallel port version, he installed an ATAPI model and I used the parallel port version with whatever PC equipment I had around, and I had one disk. Later, I inherited a USB Zip250 drive and a Mac I had inherited the old IDE/ATAPI Zip100 drive, making it practical for me to use them. (Almost annoyingly, though, because by then I had an Ethernet router and three or four computers connecting to one-another with file sharing anyway, plus a DVD burner on the PowerBook I had.)
Rewinding a little, though…
My own reaction to the removal of the floppy diskette drive was delayed, because I didn't have computers without them. Even with floppy drives available though, my software ecosystem was relative weak, and I didn't have very many diskettes or a good way to organize them, physically.
One of my strongest memories from this era was when I asked a friend of mine who had access to more Internet connectivity to download an MP3 file for me (1). The file was something like 3.4 megabytes, and needed to be split across 3 or 4 floppy diskettes. He used PKzip on a Windows computer to compress and split the file, and then handed me an envelope with the attendant diskettes in it. I had to hold on to those diskettes for like a month while I frantically searched for a program to open that data on a Mac.
I eventually got the file open and could listen to the song. I didn't think about it in this way at the time, but the limitations of floppy diskettes had been holding me back for some time. Other ecosystems for large data transfers and backups had existed for a very long time, but most were very expensive, many were discontinued by the time I was using computers, and things like external SCSI hard disks, Zip100 mechanisms and even SyQuest and Bernoulli media were uncommon at garage sales and in used computer retailers at the time. I'm convinced most people were keeping these peripherals and moving them from system to system at the time.
I could use floppy diskettes to transfer data, but I didn't have the context or a good way to find out the paid version of Stuffit was one of the best ways to put a large-ish amount of data on floppy diskettes. I moved some data from one machine to the next, but not a whole lot.
The situation got worse when I picked up a used iMac a few years later. It didn't have an iMac and it wasn't in the cards for us to even get a diskette drive for it, let alone, say, a USB Zip100 drive and one or more SCSI Zip100 drives for my other Macs. The iMac had Ethernet, but none of my other Macs did. The iMac had a modem, but none of my other Macs did (until after I got the iMac, at which point I found a 56k external modem) but I never mastered the art of dialing from one computer to the next. I should have been able to do it with real phone lines, but I was hoping for something involving a direct connection, for performance, reliability, and timing reasons. (It would not have been a leisurely experience to try to transfer a gig of crap from my Power Mac 7300 or Quadra 840 to the iMac via phone lines, but if I could have done it directly, the speed would not have mattered, and I could move things around much more frequently.)
Even if I had been able to buy a Zip or SuperDisk drive for the iMac as well as for my other computers, I would not have been able to use that to transfer files to other people. Literally nobody I knew had a SuperDisk drive, and my Mac SuperDisk mechanisms would not work on their Windows computers. I knew one or two other people with a Zip drive, but it was nowhere near universal, and there wasn't one at school.
The first USB thumb drives weren't available until several years after the iMac was, and even though Apple wanted you to believe that the "i" in iMac stood for the Internet, it wasn't really practical yet. Several years later (in 2000), Apple would address the issue with the iTools service, which did include iDisk, an online storage space. It wouldn't become particularly practical until a little later than that under the .Mac moniker. With .Mac, Apple provided some additional software (Anti-Virus, extra Garage Band content, and Backup) as well as space for a web page, an e-mail account, and critically, an online storage space that presented itself as a mounted disk on your computer. You could use Backup to make backups to either the iDisk (Apple's name for the storage space), an external hard disk or to writeable CD or DVD media.
.Mac only offered ten gigabytes of space. It would have been enough to back up writings, a few critical photos, a modest mail database, and perhaps your taxes or other financial data, but you would have been hard pressed to put a whole bunch of video up on it. It served the need though. Just the previous year, Apple released the "DV" version of the iMac G3 computers, which had the capability to capture and edit DV video.
The real trouble with this is that most people in the US were still using dial-up Internet at the time. I never had an iTools account, because I didn't have Internet connectivity at that moment, and I didn't bother using .Mac because it was costly, and I couldn't make very good use of it on my dial-up connection anyway.
Other online storage services wouldn't show up until almost ten years later when Microsoft SkyDrive and Dropbox showed up in 2007. Those services function differently, however, by syncing the contents of the storage space to your local computer. This made it a little better to sync on slow Internet connections, which made things simpler but perhaps not better.
Many people say that it was rewriteable CDs that ultimately replaced floppy diskettes. There is some, but I would argue, not a whole lot of truth to this. For starters, CD-RW equipment was uncommon and cost a lot more until much later. You couldn't easily put just a few files on a CD. You needed to keep the amount of space for your CD available on your main hard disk, because the process worked like this:
- Gather a bunch of files.
- Put them into a burning program like Toast or Nero, or on a disk image, with a Mac.
- Close all other tasks and applications.
- Burn the CD, make sure to test it.
Burning a CD (or later, a DVD, which needed even more disk space and took more time and was more expensive) wasn't just something you could do because you forgot to print your homework on your way out the door before school. It was a big project each time, and it was something you did maybe once every few weeks to get old junk off your computer, not something you could do quickly. There are re-writeable DVDs and CDs, but they are incredibly inconvenient for this task. If you carry a word document or a presentation to a collaborator's computer, they need to copy that file (and any others) off the media, then make their edits, and then completely re-burn the disc.
Flash disks came onto the scene in the early 2000s, but I don't think they were practical until a few years after their introduction. I came by some flash drives in the 64-256MB range in 2006-2007, at which point, networking had come out and in 2007, both OneDrive and Dropbox launched for free, offering a few gigs of file syncing and sharing space.
In the end, there were (and are now) lot of solutions, but most of them cost a lot, took a long time to materialize, and many of them presumed things that weren't true in 1998, and weren't even necessarily true in 2006. When I got a flash drive, it fell right in with what eventually materialized as my standard workflow. The flash disk was always a swing space, used for storing working copies or copies of only specific documents for transmission. My main document store was on the hard disk of my laptop, with monthly "Junk archives" going to DVD-R, and backups of certain files periodically going to DVD-R as well.
Later, buying big external hard disks became more reasonable, and even further after that, in addition to counting on destination computers having USB ports being a reliable thing, you could usually rely on other locations to have an Internet connection. In addition to all of that online storage spaces have become larger and cheaper. For backups, various cloud services exist which charge less than $10 a month. Some have gotten the cost down to below $5 monthly.
The challenge now is that we have an utter glut of good options for massive amounts of data storage. Pocketable, multi-terabyte hard disks cost approximately what just a few 100 megabyte cartridges did a few years ago. We're at the point where it's generally reasonable to presume that if you can buy a computer you can buy some kind of data storage for it.
It's hard to decide, if you have a computer to back up or if you need to preserve some photos, whether you should use the money on a cheap subscription service, or an external hard disk every year or so.
To use these cheap external storage devices with a new Mac, you need an exceptionally inexpensive adapter, which you buy a single time. Perhaps you buy two if your computer has more ports. You buy the new adapter a single time and then you use it as long as you have any devices that use that type of connector.
It will be inconvenient for a few years, and then new peripherals will come along and be purchased to use the new connector. The new connector will presumably last a long time, long enough for the vision of the standards to be finished and bad cables or improperly implemented ones to be weeded out. In all, I am confident it'll be a lot less damaging than the transition away from floppy diskettes ever was. There will, for starters, be a cheap, easy way to connect existing hardware to new machines. There are already peripherals with the appropriate connector, and as far as I have seen, they do not cost more than existing peripherals.
It will be a lot less bad than the removal of the floppy diskette drive.
- It was "Changes" by 2Pac Shakur. I had been listening to a MIDI rendition of it for a while, and we were both surprised when we heard the real song.