14th September 2016, 11:08 PM
Rewritable CDs are unreliable and take quite some time to burn. They also can take some time to burn. I've never thought of CD-RWs as being a decent replacement for floppies, they're better for longer-term storage. And anyway, I don't think we had one. I certainly didn't have a CD-R drive in the computer I got in fall '01; I chose a DVD drive instead of a CD-R drive. I wouldn't have a writer (DVD-RW drive) in that machine until 2005 or 2006. The computer we had at home may have had a CD-R drive well before that, I think it did actually, but I didn't use it that much.
So what was I using in '98? Zip disks. The things fail all the time, sure, but at least it doesn't take forever to write to the disk, unlike a CD, and 100MB (or more for later models) is plenty for most things I could have needed it for. That computer I got in '01 may not have had a CD writer when I got it, but it did, and still does, have a Zip 250 drive.
In college though, I mostly used email and printouts for school purposes, yeah. But in high school before that (I graduated in spring '01), it was mostly printouts and floppy disks. But in general, while their usefulness dropped rapidly over the first half of the '00s, I really do think that it was flash drives that ended the usefulness of floppy disks. Zip disks and CD-Rs both have significant drawbacks that kept them from becoming the major format, either the hassle of burning a disk, the reliability problems for both formats, media costs, or what have you. Flash drives have none of those drawbacks, except for cost but that is alleviated by how much they can hold and how reliable they are (provided you don't break them of course). There are a lot of reasons people would want files on physical media and not only email or some other digital file transfer protocol, and it's flash drives that succeeded in the market bigtime in a way nothing had since floppies.
(Of course, me being me the computer I got in 2007 still had (and has) a floppy drive in it, but that was mostly for compatibility with my floppy disk game collection, not because I expected to use it much for storage purposes. And it's never had a Zip drive, since flash drives rendered those irrelevant.)
So what was I using in '98? Zip disks. The things fail all the time, sure, but at least it doesn't take forever to write to the disk, unlike a CD, and 100MB (or more for later models) is plenty for most things I could have needed it for. That computer I got in '01 may not have had a CD writer when I got it, but it did, and still does, have a Zip 250 drive.
In college though, I mostly used email and printouts for school purposes, yeah. But in high school before that (I graduated in spring '01), it was mostly printouts and floppy disks. But in general, while their usefulness dropped rapidly over the first half of the '00s, I really do think that it was flash drives that ended the usefulness of floppy disks. Zip disks and CD-Rs both have significant drawbacks that kept them from becoming the major format, either the hassle of burning a disk, the reliability problems for both formats, media costs, or what have you. Flash drives have none of those drawbacks, except for cost but that is alleviated by how much they can hold and how reliable they are (provided you don't break them of course). There are a lot of reasons people would want files on physical media and not only email or some other digital file transfer protocol, and it's flash drives that succeeded in the market bigtime in a way nothing had since floppies.
(Of course, me being me the computer I got in 2007 still had (and has) a floppy drive in it, but that was mostly for compatibility with my floppy disk game collection, not because I expected to use it much for storage purposes. And it's never had a Zip drive, since flash drives rendered those irrelevant.)
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