7 May
1998
7 May
'98
2:50 p.m.
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