Yahoo! News Story - Floppy Disk Becoming Relic of the Past (fwd)

[John Foust]

At 11:44 PM 9/19/2004, Roger Merchberger wrote:
>>The serial port _is_ disappearing.  I am concerned.  [...] 
>>USB-to-serial dongles are
>>_not_ a seamless solution.  The two arenas this is cropping up are
>>modern Macs and modern laptops.  While these devices are not covered
>>under the 10-year umbrella, they will be at some point, and when they
>>are, they will _not_ have native serial ports and there will be many
>>things that we do with ease now, with 5-year-old machines that we be
>>hard five years from now.
>
>Some are better than others, but you are right - they are rarely a "seamless" solution by any means. I have a belkin adapter that so far has done everything I ask of it - Winders & Linux. 

I recently tried a Belkin USB-to-serial and a second brand (Amb-something)
on my Win2000 box in hopes of delivering an extra serial port for
my old Palm III.  No go!  Both blue-screened when Palm Desktop
tried to access the serial port.  I suspect that either my motherboard
USB is blown or the drivers didn't like a dual-processor machine.

There are PCMCIA to serial adapters, no?  And we'll be able to
insert PCI serial cards as long as PCI is around.  

But I'd love to have a USB-to-floppy connection, too.  And we'd all 
love it if it was 8", 5 1/4", 3 1/2" and 2" compatible.  :-)

- John