Imation Corp. and Panasonic Industrial Co. said they will develop the first SuperDisk drive for the Universal Serial Bus, a type of link for computer peripherals. The announcement follows Wednesday's unveiling by Apple Computer Inc. of its new consumer Macintosh, iMac, which will feature two USB ports for peripherals. iMac will begin to ship in August, the same time-frame in which USB SuperDisk drives also are expected to be available to iMac purchasers, Panasonic and Imation said in a joint statement.

The USB SuperDisk drive, like other SuperDisk drives, will be fully read/write compatible with today's PC-formatted 120 MB SuperDisk diskettes, 1.44 MB diskettes and 720 KB diskettes. It will also read and write existing Mac-formatted diskettes and Mac-formatted SuperDisk diskettes, the companies said.

http://www.imation.com/

(c) Reuters