>	Frankly, I'm getting really sick of backward compatibility.  I
> don't *want* floppies around anymore.

The floppy drive on my NetBSD box broke a few months ago.  I haven't replaced
it yet.

> If floppies *are* that important, someone will make a USB floppy drive.

In fact, they have.

> I do believe this was a failure in the iMac.  USB is not a
> replacement for SCSI, but for peripherals like scanners, etc...

The iMac was aimed at light-duty consumer use, not to be a major workstation
with 6 18G disks and a DAT-changer.  Anyway, what's the beef with running
disks over USB?  People run disks over Ethernet all the time!  (It's called
NFS.)  In fact, if you are adding iMacs to an existing installation, you
can use an older Mac with Ethernet as a file server (that's what I did at
home).  (Granted, no one has ever *enjoyed* using NFS... ;-)

> //      Although ethernet is definitely the way to go, there are still
> // a lot of old Macs out there running on localtalk that people would
> // like to have access to their new machines.  Not to mention all the
> // localtalk only printers.
> 	Aren't there localtalk to ethertalk bridges?  That seems like
> enough compatibility to me.

Farallon's iPrint bridge is about $100; it works great, and even made it
easier for me to share the home laser printer between Macs and the NetBSD
box (I use CAP to access the laser printer via Ethernet now).


Consumers, especially those without computers yet, were the target market for
the iMac.  They don't have boatloads of old hardware to re-use (and that which
they do have is likely to be skanky old PC hardware that no Mac, and no modern
PC, could use anyway).  Those iMac purchasers with old Macs just need to be
creative how they reuse the hardware (don't throw out that old Performa,
just designate it the home file server!).

(And just so there's some vestigal NetBSD relevance -- if only I could run
NetBSD on my Performa 6290, so that I could use CAP's AppleShare IP instead
of the slower AppleShare/EtherTalk MacOS provides by default...)