I don't remember the dinner-plate sized IBM disks from the caveman days, but I remember all too well the 5.25 floppy. The 3.5 disks seemed so much better and stored so much more...and now they're verging on obsolete. Name one major app that fits on a single 3.5 disk today. Five competing, mutually incompatible technologies are competing for market acceptance now. Three of them (Caleb's UHD 144, Imation's SuperDisk, and the SonyHiFi disk) accept today's floppies. The others, Iomega's Zip and (the now-bankrupt) SyQuest's EZFlyer and SparQ, are familiar as storage technology. Early predictions give Iomega and Sony a leg up, but some sources like Caleb for budget systems. And Imation's SuperDisk may just be the biggest market hog of them all -- the SuperDisk stores more data than the Zip disks, and they'll read the 3.5 disks littering today's file cabinets. On a different tack, Panasonic is readying a new type of disk drive, the FD32MB, that will allow regular 3.5 disks to store up to 32MB of data, giving new life and new uses for the old format. So don't throw away those floppies just yet.

Of course, the idea is to phase out the 3.5 floppy in favor of the rewritable CD. Up until now, the biggest obstacle is the necessity for special software to burn CDs with -- no simple dragging&dropping files onto a CD-RW like on a floppy. Well, the new "Mount Rainier" format (more info from www.mt-rainier.org/) is a standard for true drag&drop filing onto CD-RWs, built into the operating system just like today's floppies. Windows XP supports drag&drop filing on CD-Rs now, but the Mt. Rainier format, also known as CD-MRW, is gaining widespread support as a universal format for OS support of CD-RW drives. There's a lot to like about the new MRW format. It doesn't require preformatting of the CD -- the system formats the CD when you first copy data to it. It also handles defects in the CDs themselves much better than standard CD burners, rendering CD-RWs more stable and trustworthy for critical data backup. CD-MRW drives can read all other CD formats, but non-MRW drives need custom reader software to read MRW discs. Look for MRW drives on a PC near you. The industry consortium that gave us MRW includes HP/Compaq, Microsoft, Philips, and Sony; all of the major operating system vendors, including Microsoft, Apple, and Linux, are backing MRW (Microsoft's new Longhorn OS will incorporate MRW technology).