Compaq forecasts death of the floppy

Hardware giant Compaq introduced two storage technologies last week, a 120Mb disk drive and rewriteable CD. Neil Dagger, Compaq option product manager, said this spells the end of the 1.44Mb floppy.

'The 1.44Mb floppy is dead and we should organise its funeral,' he said. 'Why should anyone bother with it when this drive is fully backward compatible and five times as fast.' The drive costs #170 and the diskettes cost under #10. They were developed in collaboration with Matsushita and 3M.

These companies will offer the systems to other PC vendors, Dagger confirmed.

The CD drive costs #435 and a pack of two disks costs #65.