To ALL: I found this on Zacks/Prnews.
ROY, UTAH, U.S.A., 1996 SEP 20 (NB) -- By Bob Woods. In a move to
replace the 3.5-inch 1.44 megabyte (MB) floppy disk format, Iomega Corp.
[NASDAQ:IOMG] said its internal Zip drives for original equipment
manufacturers (OEMs) are expected to be bootable as drive A on some new
personal computers (PCs). Iomega is receiving support from American
Megatrends and Phoenix Technologies to change BIOS's (basic input/output
system) in future PCs to make internal Zip drives bootable.
With this announcement, Iomega is "one step closer to making the Zip
drive the replacement for the (3.5-inch) floppy drive," A. Cory Maloy,
Iomega spokesperson, told Newsbytes. Removable Zip cartridges hold 100
MB's of data -- more than 70 times of a 3.5-inch floppy diskette, Iomega
said.
Maloy called the 3.5-inch floppy form factor an "outdated technology,"
and he said that the format is about the only aspect of today's modern
PCs that hasn't changed in the past ten years.
Iomega's plans are to change that with the internal Zip drive.
Already, more than two million units are in, on top of,
beside, or travel with personal computers around the world.
Iomega's Zip drive is already sold as either an option or a standard
piece of hardware in computers from eight different companies, including
Micron, Maloy said. All of the pieces are now in place for a takeover of
the 3.5-inch floppy format, with the added support of BIOS
manufacturers, Maloy said.
PCs with bootable drives are expected to hit the marketplace by early
1997, officials said. Maloy wouldn't make public Iomega's estimates of
bootable Zip drives expected to be in use after manufacturers roll them
out next year.
Maloy did say that the success of the bootable Zip drive now "depends on
the computer manufacturers."
Iomega's initial goal for the Zip drive when it was introduced fourteen
months ago wasn't to take over the 3.5-inch format, Maloy said. "In the
early stages, we wanted to create a mass market product," he said.
"Before the Zip drive came out, the whole removable storage market
totaled about 2 million units a year, including Iomega's Bernoulli
and Syquest's drives. But the computer market in general measures itself
in tens of millions of units a year. We wanted to create a product that
would jump on that curve."
Que's Computer Dictionary defines the term "boot" as initiating "an
automatic routine that clears the (computer's) memory, loads the
operating system, and prepares the computer for use."
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