Please don’t send me a floppy disk
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on March 30, 2007 at 11:57 am
Our computers have at least 18 ways to connect with the outside world. Enough for any sane person, surely? With such a wide choice of getting data into our Macs, why do people still send us floppy disks?
Starting with the oldest laptop, we have Infrared, useful for connecting to mobile phones and the occasional computer to computer connection but painfully slow.
Next comes Bluetooth 1 and 2. A new venture for us since our mobile phones have all been IR until the latest. The tiny D-Link Bluetooth dongle sitting in the USB port in the back of the monitor is acceptably fast at over a megabyte a minute throughput. Unlike the serial modems built into our two oldest computers. They are for those times when DSL is unavailable and for faxing, which is seldom since idiots sending junk faxes ruined fax use in the UK in the same way spam is for e-mails.
USB 1 and 2 are the next slowest interfaces. Apple pioneered USB after abandoning its proprietary Apple Desktop Bus. Around the same time it also abandoned SCSI, the problematic high speed connector, still in use today in some settings but which brings back memories of correct termination, SCSI ID’s and daisy chaining scanners, hard disks and CD drives. Our first Microtec SCSI scanner had an annoying habit of zapping any hard disk it was connected to.
The throughput achieved by USB is not great but it works well. Apple’s Firewire 400 and 800 seem more robust and have much higher speeds than their respective USB counterparts. Firewire can also connect computers together in two other ways. One is in hard disk mode, something that most Windows PCs are seemingly incapable of because of the way their hard drive boot sectors are written. In Firewire disk mode, the drive of the slave computer can be mounted on the host and used as an external drive, or even start up the host.
Firewire can also make a very high speed network which matches the best ether-networks for consistent throughput. We have always expected more to come from Firewire networking which is dead easy to set up and extremely rapid.
As for LAN networking, we have wireless 802.11 a, b, g and n capacity as well as 10/100/1000 base ethernet the latter being something we wait for a DSL router with gigabyte ethernet and wireless capability. Even Apple’s Airport Extreme is only 10/100.
Finally there are hot-swapable hard drives, CDs and DVDs plus a new device due to arrive here, ethernet over power circuits. That will come with our Apple TV box when we order it.
So please, don’t send any more floppy disks.
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