A few years ago, people with IBM PC-compatible computers thought I was mad to have a Macintosh with almost more RAM than they had hard disk space.
The Mac was then - as it still is today - the platform of choice for designers, and designers have large files. But a few things over the past two years have changed the average PC.
Software has taken off to such an extent that people can fill a gigabyte (Gb) drive with little difficulty. (The fact that one fills it with rubbish is neither here nor there). The Internet has also had an effect on the growing size of hard disks and binary space in general: the more we download, the more space we need.
These large hard disks make it more difficult than ever before to back things up on a few floppy disks. (If you are not interested in doing the maths, I can tell you that a 1Gb hard disk would need nearly 100 floppies to back it up and hours of time to do it). The answer, of course, is to find something else.
The are a few criteria for this something that most of us would like. It would be nice to have something that could hold a large amount of data and was cheap, reliable, fast and small.
The choice seems to have narrowed to the following: a magnetic optical (MO) disk, a SyQuest, a Bernoulli, a Zip or a Jaz. Although other media are on the horizon, these are the only choices available today.