This reminds me of a psychic parlor trick.

The Sony-designed 3.5″ floppy drive (1982) first made waves in the mid-1980s with its use in the Apple Macintosh, released in 1984. The format quickly gained popularity in the PC market and overtook the 5.25″ floppy disk in overall usage by the early 1990s. PC clone manufacturers, many of whom had supported both the larger and smaller floppy formats, eventually stopped including 5.25″ drives in their machines.

Today, 3.5″ floppy drives are rarely found in new PCs thanks to more capacious CD-Rs, removable flash media (especially USB thumb drives), and nearly ubiquitous computer networking. However, that hasn’t stopped Windows XP from requiring @#^$ RAID drivers on a floppy disk when it’s being installed.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you still use 3.5″ floppy disks regularly? What for?

Younger computer fans may not know this, but for almost twenty years (1980-1999), Apple, Inc. sold Apple-brand printers for use with its computers — a fact that’s easy for us to forget today, ten years since Apple shipped its last printer.

That being so, Macworld recently asked me to write an article about Apple’s long history in the printer business. I was happy to take the assignment, of course, and a few days ago, Macworld published the result, titled “Apple’s Five Most Important Printers.” I structured the article along the same lines as the popular Mac laptops piece I did back in September.

In the course of writing the article, I learned more than I thought I’d ever know about Apple printers, and I enjoyed the research process quite a bit. Of particular interest was Apple’s original LaserWriter (1985, seen above), a famous peripheral that holds a monumentally important place in computer history.

I also created a companion slideshow of various Apple printers for Macworld, which you can see here. I hope you enjoy it.

VC&G Collecting Tip: Remove your old computer clock batteries.

Right now.

I’m serious: do it. Despite my regular battery purges (done to avoid just such a situation), I forgot to remove the Mac IIsi PRAM battery you see above because the computer was buried under a bunch of stuff. The battery electrolyte leaked out and corroded everything it touched, ruining the logic board. Sometimes you can recover from battery leaks with extensive cleaning if the damage isn’t that bad. In this case, it wasn’t worth the effort. Bye, bye, IIsi.

While you’re ditching the vintage clock batteries, do yourself a favor and remove the main power batteries from any laptops in your collection. I typically store laptop batteries in a gallon zipper bag each. Even if the batteries are dead/bad (which they usually are), I save the plastic cases for re-use if I plan to rebuild the battery in the future.

As a good rule of thumb, never keep batteries (no matter how new) in any electronic device for longer than a couple weeks of non-use. Any longer, and you’re just playing Russian roulette with your gadgets.

Almost all batteries leak eventually. If your old ones haven’t leaked already, you’re very lucky. Focus on alkaline and NiCd batteries first, because they leak the worst; lithium cells can leak as well (as seen above), but it’s less common overall.

Regardless of the type, if they’re old, remove them now — even if it requires clipping or desoldering — and spare yourself the leaky battery blues later on.

As you may have already noticed by my previous two posts, the Macintosh Portable turns 20 this week. As part of the celebrations, I not only took one apart for Technologizer, but I also wrote two Macintosh laptop retrospectives for Macworld: “The Five Most Important Mac Laptops” and a slideshow, “Twenty Years of Notable Apple Totables.” Hope you enjoy them.

Twenty years ago, Apple released its first laptop computer, the Macintosh Portable. It was a large and heavy beast, oft maligned (especially now) for its size and high expense.

But at the Portable’s heart sits a truly clever design — very nice for 1989 — that incorporated a number of interesting features people often overlook, since few have actually seen a Portable in the flesh.

In honor of this anniversary, I decided to take apart a Mac Portable for the seventh entry in my “workbench series” of technology teardowns. This time, Technologizer is hosting the slideshow.

Please join me as I pry into its secrets (including hidden case signatures!), compare the Portable to an iPod Touch (six of which could fit inside the Mac Portable’s battery), and just generally ogle over the beautiful technological clockwork that makes the Portable tick.

Here are my previous teardowns, if you’re interested (all at PC World): Nintendo Game Boy, Nintendo Famicom, Apple IIc, Commodore 64, IBM Model M Keyboard, and TRS-80 Model 100.

P.S. In case you didn’t notice, our Retro Scan of the Week this week focuses on the Portable as well.