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  [Hardware]

As we move forward in 21st century, I'm continually baffled that the world is still supporting floppy controllers. I associate floppy disks with old 486 problems - they remind me of resorting to my 5-1/4" boot disk to get me out of weird situations. They also bring back memories of shareware games that came on one or two 3.5" disks, like the old 1st persons Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, and even old Apogee Software games like the side scrolling Duke Nukem. A friend of mine still has the original Commander Keen on a 5-1/4" disk.

Where I work, there was once an engineer that used floppy disks regularly. He was a BIOS developer, and would throw binaries on them and give them to other engineers for BIOS testing. I've occasionally used them for DOS boot disks, but nine times out of ten, they don't have the capacity for the files I need, so I just use a bootable USB key, or a PCMCIA ATA flash card. I've been using the same USB key and ATA flash card for at least three years now, and haven't had them "go bad" on me. But I lost track of the number of floppies I've thrown away. Flash technology can be used on every PC these days. Even my ancient desktop PC that runs at 733MHz has USB ports, and the PCI bus is always expandable. It has a floppy drive, but I just don't trust it, as whenever I've put a floppy in it, it comes out covered in dust.

As we approach 2008, we still don't leave the floppy behind us. In fact, there are designs in progress where I work that have floppy controllers on boards next to USB 2.0 and IDE flash chip sockets. The only explanation I see for this is that it doesn't take much effort to design a floppy controller into hardware. It's on almost every super I/O chip out there, and what could go wrong when connecting a handful of low speed signals to a 0.1" header? Especially when it makes that one customer happy. I haven't used Vista yet, but the save icon in Microsoft Word for XP is still a picture of a floppy disk.

I was digging through a bin of old computer hardware in my closet, and found a pile of old hardware I've never parted with: eight 30-pin SIMM RAM (FPRAM) modules from my old 486, an old modem, a Pentium 75MHz processor with the P54 core, a 5-1/4" floppy drive from my old 486, and about six 3.5" floppy drives. I also found an old add-in board with some funny looking chips. One chip, in a 44-pin PLCC package, was the Western Digital WD37C65C. I looked up this guy and found out it was the first PC/AT floppy controller, designed back in 1987! Digging around some more, I found a scanned copy of the WD37C65C datasheet.

So here we are twenty years later, and the computer hardware world just won't let go of the floppy. We've been through ZIP drives with parallel port interfaces (ooooh, so enhanced!), minidiscs, and even USB floppy drives. ZIP disks were cool for backup for some of us here and there. I got my hands on one back during my freshman year in college. By that time, email was a more convenient way to get my files between my dorm room and lab. Minidisc technology is my favorite - with the shudder door having "don't forget the floppy!" written all over it. The USB floppy controller is an excuse to have another USB product. If the interface is there, use a disk-on-key already!

I don't think I have a good solution for how to move the world away from the floppy. Unless... One day I design a USB key that's shaped like a floppy disk, complete with write protection as it was on 3.5" disks. The shutter door will also be there, and when you open it, you'll see some flash memory.

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