Today's PCs have more than 100 times as much. The venerable floppy drive has tenaciously held on because it and the disks used with it are inexpensive and reliable and because floppy disks are so portable - you can pop one into your shirt pocket. But as file sizes grow ever larger, it's becoming ever clearer that the floppy drive's days are numbered. Were it not for inertia on the part of consumers and conservatism on the part of manufacturers, floppies would be resting in peace right now. They're called floppy disks only because their predecessors, 5.25-inch disks that held either 360 kilobytes or 1.2 megabytes of data, were bendable.
Floppy drives are part of a larger category of storage products called removable media drives.
One of the driving forces behind the demise of the floppy drive is Apple, the first major manufacturer to ship mainstream systems sans floppy drive. Problem is, it doesn't include a replacement with its iMacs or G3s, which has led to considerable criticism. Rumor has it that Apple left out the floppy drive because the popular iMac was originally designed as a network computer without local storage, a market that never fully developed. Apple still expects people to exchange files over the Internet. Though this is an option, it is not often the fastest or most convenient, particularly if you are among the majority of people without a fast cable, DSL or T1 connection.