in 2001 i got a sony picturebook (with the transmeta cpu) and i had trouble installing linux because the kernel failed boot because it could not find a floppy drive. (i was booting from a usb floppy the bios was emulating as a normal floppy, while linux later was detecting it as a hard disk. because of the emulation, the kernel expected to be booting from a floppy, and so it insisted on looking for one)

i don't remember how i solved the problem, but i do remember rummaging in the kernel sources to see if i could figure out how to disable that floppy check.

so we have gone from a point where the floppy was seemingly mandatory to a point where it is finally dead.