Intel is finally inciting the death of the floppy drive and is calling on PC manufacturers big and small to stop supplying the once-capacious 1.44MB removable drive in the latter half of 2002.
So say confidential Intel documents seen by The Register. The chip giant wants OEMs to phase out the floppy in the second half of 2002. It hopes they will pull the plug - as it were - on PS/2 and serial ports at the same time.
The parallel port will be with us for a little while longer - Intel has yet to timetable its demise. And we note that corporate-oriented PCs will continue to ship with floppy drives after their consumer counterparts have ceased to do so, according to Intel"s technology roadmap.
Mac users have long been forced to live without legacy ports and floppy drives after Apple CEO Steve Jobs struck them off the company"s spec. sheets some years back. We can"t say we miss "em since any file that can be fit on a floppy can be emailed to another user in moments.