At the risk of revealing my religious orientation, I admit that I was among the first 100,000 idiots who shelled out two and a half grand for the first Macintosh in 1984. No hard drive, a single 400K floppy and a whopping 128K of RAM.

Well, Jobs is back, and he's stung me again. I'm staring at the latest rabbit he's pulled out of his hat: the iMac. While it has all sorts of wonderful things the 128K Mac didn't, what it lacks may drive you up a wall. It has no LocalTalk connector, so everything on your no muss, no fuss local network has just sailed out the window. There's no serial ports either, so all of those scanners, digital cameras, joysticks, electric dog polishers (just checking to see if you're paying attention?), will not play with your new box.

But the biggest minus, and the baddest rap laid on the iMac, is the bizarre lack of a floppy drive (or any other type of removable drive). Floppies have gone with personal computers ever since the Woz worked his engineering voodoo back in the apocryphal garage days.

Enter Imation's SuperDisk. The SuperDisk was co-created by Imation (a 3M spin-off) and our friends over at Compaq. They saw all the big bucks Iomega was raking in with the Zip drive and wanted in on the action. They did the Zip one better, though: not only does their removable uber-floppy hold more stuff than a Zip disk (120 vs. 100 MB), it's still compatible with the humble 1.4MB floppy we all know and...well...we all know.

Imation's been floggin' this solution for a few years now, mostly on the Wintel side of the street. On the Mac side, SuperDisk has recently come to the rescue as iMac early adopters scramble for a back-up/data transfer medium.

What can I say about the SuperDisk? It's a cute little peripheral, done in the same Bondi Blue and translucent plastic as its iMac parent. It uses one of the iMac's USB ports and has a separate power supply. It doesn't read 800K floppies, which is a "gotcha" I didn't expect. (Oddly enough, it *does* accept 720K PC-formated disks.) It takes a while for the unit to recognize a floppy, be it a 1.4 or a 120MB, and it's noisy -- so noisy that I *never* leave a disk in it if I don't have to. It's fast, but not blazingly so. I just copied a 40MB archive in about 6.5 minutes.

The real value of the SuperDisk for me is acting as a bridge between my new machine and all of the data that I've generated since the first time Jobs snookered me into buying a beautiful little magic box full of possibilities and all of the "gotchas" that good magic always seems to cost.