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Origins
of the Floppy Drive
Woz's
Floppy Drive Miracle
Lisa,
the Apple III, and the Twiggy Fiasco
Mass
storage and the Macintosh Project
A
Floppy for Macintosh
Manual
vs. Auto Eject: The Great Floppy Debate
iMac
and the End of an Era
Sources
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Manual vs. Auto
Eject: The Great Floppy Debate
The Macintosh, from the Mac 128k up until the Quadra 605, included
floppy drives that featured auto-inject and auto-eject. Auto-inject sucks
the disk out of your hand into the drive if you push the disk in most
of the way. Auto-eject ejects the disk from the drive when the user drags
the disk icon to the trash in the Finder. IBM PC-compatibles, in contrast,
have never offered either of these features, forcing users to push the
disks all the way into the drive and press a button on the drive to manually
eject the disk.
The origin of auto-eject can be attributed to Steve Jobs conception of
the Macintosh as a "crankless Volkswagen" that runs "a
system which is generally intuitive to users." (Young, p. 245) In
the Finder of the Macintosh operating system, the icon of a floppy disk
appears when a disk is inserted. When the user is finished working with
the disk, she drags the floppy icon to the trash, and the disk is ejected.
Auto-eject completes the metaphor of the desktop, providing the user with
a consistent experience.
In DOS on PC-compatible systems, inserting a floppy disk results in no
immediate visual feedback. (Even in Windows 9x/NT, the floppy drive icon
remains visible whether or not a disk is inserted.) The user must type
the highly intuitive "cd A:" in order to even access the contents
of the floppy disk. PC users often argue that the manual eject offers
them the freedom to remove their disk whenever they please; however, this
freedom can be quite dangerous when new users try to eject a floppy while
it is being written to or read from. Auto-eject, therefore, is not only
a means of consistency, but also of preventing potentially catastrophic
user error.
The
manual-inject Quadra 605
Auto-inject, while arguably less important to the user experience than
auto-eject, also provides a certain intangible elegance to using a Macintosh.
Auto-inject was included with every Mac model with a built-in floppy drive
(except for the PowerBooks, which presumably sacrificed elegance for battery
life) up to the Quadra 605, released in October 1993. The elimination
of auto-inject came at a time when Apple was struggling to compete with
low-cost PC clones. Removing auto-inject and cutting other costs allowed
Apple to sell the speedy Quadra 605 for a mere $900. Auto-eject, however,
remained a hallmark of all Macintosh floppy drives until they were eliminated
completely from the Macintosh line.
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