I believe a lot of laptops had swappable bays for drives — i.e. you could switch between an FDD and a CD drive on the fly. Definitely seen that on some of the Compaq LTE series. Others had their proprietary ports and external floppy drives.

By the mid 90s floppys were considered out of date already. Even though desktops and laptops had them , they were there only for legacy support. Laptops with cd drives/zip disk/ usb ports were seen as futuristic and there for much more marketable.

The real question you should be asking is , why do many 2000's desktops have floppys still? 🤣. In a time when dvd burners existed along side floppy drives it seemed silly to keep putting them in desktops.

Even in the classic computer enthusiast universe , floppy drive can be emulated through software or replaced with usb stick emulators. Unless the machine is very old or very proprietary

Very true about the floppy modules. I considered that, but it seems the floppy modules are rare, so i'm guessing nobody bought them, at least for the powerbooks. Although no for the dell latitudes. One of the reasons it seems odd to me is I remember handing in class projects on floppies all the time, and the infamous sneakernet. That makes sense though that floppies just seemed outdated and undesirable.

As for the modern PCs, it is pretty funny. My poweredge 2900 has one and I never use it. I considered using it to back up logs, but other than that I have no use for it.

I have a CTX EzBook 700 series laptop with interchangeable 20x cd rom drive and 3.5 floppy drive, so they probably came with both which you could swap out when you needed to.

Most Toshiba Satellites/Tecras of the time had a proprietary connector & cable for an external floppy drive. You could also swap the CD drive with the same "external" floppy drive and make it an internal drive. Sadly I only have the CD unit for my 440CDX.

It's funny how consistent laptop manufacturers were with floppy drives....I have an old NEC Pentium 166 laptop (from 1998?) with no floppy, and I used to have an Acer Travelmate 290 (from 2003, that I used until 2008) that had one!

I'm surprised there aren't any more floppy defenders on here. 😀 Floppies were the most practical method of file transfer until Windows XP era. CDRs were one time use, and expensive back then, and CDRWs were slow, expensive, and didn't work on all CD drives. USB drives didn't become really convenient until XP came out either. Windows 2000 would yell at you every time you tried to unplug one without "safely removing hardware," and Win98 required drivers to recognize your USB drive. And before that, forget about it. Besides file transfer, OS installs were nightmares without a working floppy drive. I guess Win98 supported installing from a bootable CD, but you had to have a BIOS that supported booting from CD, which was rare back then. By far the most common method of OS install in Win98 and prior would be to boot from floppy and then load the CDROM drivers. I guess that's why uxwbill on YouTube says that it's not a real computer without a floppy drive. 😀

My computer professor in college required submitting work on floppy disks, and that was 1998 or 99. But I went to a retro college. 😀 He also said about floppy disks, "Use it once then throw it away." I guess he had had too many bad experiences...

Yeah, floppies were slow to phase out until XP, Me and 2K killed DOS. Burners didn't really break through in new desktop machines until 2000. CD-RW's were just a pain, because usable standards like Mt. Rainier didn't have hardware support early and only got native OS support with Vista.

My first laptop, I believe it was a Thinkpad 560 - the CPU was a 233MMX at least - came with an external floppy drive, that was connected to what I believe was some proprietary interface.

I also remember floppies feeling obsolete back then. It was a DOS thing, already then I only used them for booting when reinstalling OS:es, etc, mostly due to their unreliability. Never stored anything I wanted to keep safe on a floppy.

The problem was that most of the proprietary external floppy drives seem to have disappeared, or were an optional accessory. Same with the bay ones in a lot of laptops. Dell latitude C-series being a major exception. I do remember however laptops of the time were decent about including cd-rom boot support and having restore disks included.

Gramcon - the professors said that because you could easily put a word document on a floppy wave a magnet over it and get an extension of the deadline since it was unreadable. So if the prof requires you to use a new disk you have no excuses at all.