"David A. Gatwood" <marsmail@globegate.utm.edu> writes:

> I can't count the number of "latest and greatest" replacements for the
> floppy that have come and gone.

...

> try taking your zip cartridge into a lab to print or to
> your professor to hand in an assignment.  They want a
> floppy.

I think the theory behind abandoning floppy drives in
general is that the "latest and greatest" replacement for
the floppy is in fact the Internet, or networks in general.

Although one might argue that sending whopping great MIME
attachments is not the optimal way of sending files
around, it's certainly growing commonplace.   Hopefully
this trend will continue.

NetBSD (note the "Net" in there) seems to run just fine
in most cases when you don't have a floppy, and I can't
remember the last time I used a floppy to send files to
and fro, even to users of such strange non-NetBSD systems
as Windows or MacOS.

Where some systems that run NetBSD fall down in the sense
of requiring a floppy is in priming them in the first
place when one cannot install a system initially without
one (i.e., you can't just netboot even if you have a
fully configured and ready netboot server setup).

Hopefully such systems and NetBSD will evolve over time in
parallel, so that all you need is a working Internet
connection and some simple information to make available
to your boot ROM, and bingo -- you can start installing.
(NetBSD is mostly there already...)

	Sean.