The quest for storage has been a part of my computing life since I bought my first computer in 1983. That machine, a Commodore 64, had 35K of memory available for programming. It had no hard drive and for years didn't even offer a floppy disk drive.
If you wrote something worth saving, you connected a cassette tape drive that would store your work on cassettes. If you wanted to retrieve your work, you "loaded" the program from the cassette, a process that could take a half-hour. Computer magazines were filled with programs that you had to type in, line by line, a tedious process that could take days.My first IBM-compatible PC had a 10 megabyte hard drive, something I never imagined filling up. When that filled up, I doubled its capacity with a dubious piece of software called "Stacker." When that filled up, I bought an 80 meg hard drive for $500.
The other day I read that IBM was readying a 73 GIGABYTE hard drive for consumers; new PCs regularly come with 25 gig drives now. One game I just installed took 1.2 gigs of space for itself.
I say this only to point out that storage is important in the computing world and to encourage somebody -- anybody -- to help me stamp out the floppy disk. It's small (at 1.44 megs) and relatively trouble-prone. Out of every 50 I buy, at least five are duds.
I've just played with the new SuperDisk from Imation and have to say it's one cool product. It offers 120 megs on one disk just larger than a floppy and -- get this -- will also read the current floppy disk. In other words, PC manufacturers could substitute the LS-120 for the current floppy and we'd have the best of both worlds.
Why they don't do this can be spelled ZIP. The Iomega ZIP has become the de facto standard for larger capacity removable storage despite some terrible quality control issues (including the dreaded "Click of Death" that renders both drive and disk useless) and a PR nightmare when it didn't pay rebates in a timely manner.
What the ZIP has going for it is it was first out of the box. There are now so many ZIP drives out there that they sort of win the war by default. A case in point: When the ZIP was released, I waited and bought a Syquest EZ-135 drive instead. It was twice as fast, cheaper and its discs held 135 megs instead of 100. A couple of years later, Syquest went bankrupt, and I sold my drive on eBay for about 20 bucks. Everyone else in my office had a ZIP, and I could not share disks with anyone.
Unlike the Syquest, I do think the SuperDisk has a lot going for it. It comes in internal and external formats; has both Windows and Mac versions (it's perfect for iMac users) and is compatible with the current floppy. The USB version I used installed like a dream, one plug, one CD and a reboot and I was in business. Plus the 120-meg disks are the same size as the current floppy and cost lots less than the ZIP disks.
Take a long look at the SuperDisk when you're in the market for a backup drive or for external storage. If you don't plan to share disks with an office full of ZIP users, it's a no-brainer. If you do, try to get them to change, too. It's well worth it.
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James Derk is new media editor for The Evansville Courier & Press. His e-mail address is jderk@evansville.net.