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Retrotechtacular: The Floppy Disk Orphaned By Linux
About a week ago, Linus Torvalds made a software commit which has an air about it of the end of an era. The code in question contains a few patches to the driver for native floppy disc controllers. What makes it worthy of note is that he remarks that the floppy driver is now orphaned. Its maintainer no longer has working floppy hardware upon which to test the software, and Linus remarks that "I think the driver can be considered pretty much dead from an actual hardware standpoint", though he does point out that active support remains for USB floppy drives.
It's a very reasonable view to have arrived at because outside the realm of retrocomputing the physical rather than virtual floppy disk has all but disappeared. It's well over a decade since they ceased to be fitted to desktop and laptop computers, and where once they were a staple of any office they now exist only in the "save" icon on your wordprocessor. The floppy is dead, and has been for a long time.
Still, Linus' quiet announcement comes as a minor jolt to anyone of A Certain Age for whom the floppy disk and the computer were once inseparable.
Next thing, someone will be removing punched card and paper tape reader support. Where does it end?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:55AM (12 children)
I have nostalgia for 5 1/4" (mini) floppy, but not for 3 1/2" (micro) floppy. I bet only some old mac users feel nostalgic for 3 1/2" floppies.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:57AM (3 children)
This gives me some real nostalgia too [youtube.com] :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @01:21AM
Green or amber, that is the question.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:57AM
Obligatory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM_sAxrAu7Q [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday July 27 2019, @09:05AM
It gives me notalgia, but that's probably because of an old back injury.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:13AM (2 children)
From what I hear, 8" floppies are the minimum, as is an owner at least 6' tall.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday July 27 2019, @10:27AM (1 child)
> From what I hear, 8" floppies are the minimum, as is an owner at least 6' tall.
Yeah, but on the other hand those 8" floppies had to be inserted real gently into the slot, otherwise they got bent or broken
The 3.5s may have been much smaller, but because they were stiffer you could bang em in as hard as you wanted
What you really wanted of course was an 8in hard one, they were called "winchesters" for some reason, I can still remember the first one of those I had, all 20megs of it...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28 2019, @04:40AM
Speak for yourself...did they come in black?
(Score: 2) by SDRefugee on Saturday July 27 2019, @10:25AM (3 children)
Talk about nostalgia... I started with 8" floppies.. and a Z80 S100 computer....
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:29PM
Same here, Z-80 S100 bus computer running CP/M. Our 8" floppies spun all the time (like a hard disk) and gave surprisingly fast access to the word processor we ran.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:54PM (1 child)
Nostalgia Schmustalgia -- There are plenty of instances where floppies are still in use today. I'll give a real example. A test setup for a modern military part uses an old oscilloscope with only a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive as a way to save the waveforms. So we saved the data onto a floppy disc and used a USB floppy drive to download the data and run calculations with a PC. There is so much red-tape involved with modernizing the process that it takes literally years to get approval. Numerous such cases!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28 2019, @08:34AM
Maybe they should consider donating hardware then.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday July 29 2019, @04:13PM
The first computer in my house was some IBM machine with a 5.25" floppy drive and a 3.5" floppy drive, no HDD. I have great memories of using a BASIC computer game book to type out a program and run it. I also remember an old Alf game and some other stuff. It was quite an interesting experience growing up with Personal Computers. It's amazing how far we've come since the 1980s. My daughter's first memories will likely be of playing on a Tablet. It makes me wonder, just how much more advanced technology will be, when she's my age.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:55AM (25 children)
There are only two reasons to have a floppy drive:
1) You're old, or have a passion for history and old timey computin'
2) You're in IT, and whatever God forsaken hardware you need to administrate requires it for some reason
As for #2, that's where the USB support comes in. That's not going to last that much longer either.
The next real moment for us is when they retire the first USB interface, leaving millions of tons of old USB storage/devices unsupported. That will be slightly more impactful than the loss of a floppy that 99% of people haven't used since the Matrix movies first came out.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @01:59AM (10 children)
3) You're operating a machine which costs hundreds thousand USD and takes designs in form of 720kB Quad-density floppy, the documentation is scarce but the source code print-out (perforated paper filling an entire box) is available, however no assembler for its CPU survived. Case authentic.
FYI, the USB floppy drives are junk, I checked it with 6 of these. Ended with just an old PC for archiving and not breaking disks, as it happens with USB floppy drives (they have a nasty habit of starting and stopping their motor until disk becomes destroyed).
And better think what will happen when the only way to store data will be to connect to the "cloud". We're definitely going in this direction, we got dumbed-down Windows first, then Linux divided between filesystem tools usable almost only by programmers and GUI with features trimmed down to resemble Tamagotchi. We are probably the last generation which puts own OS and programs on "our" computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MostCynical on Saturday July 27 2019, @02:14AM
Tragically, the majority of computer users are now tablet and phone users, not IT users (professional or amateur)
So need and want drive form and function.
Wifi and bluetooth now "just work", which is wonderful.
Storage on the cloud is "more convenient", which is not wonderful at all, if you care about ownership or privacy.
The fact that multinationals and TLAs are very happy about their access to your data is reaslly only a symptom. The cause is consumers who just want "convenience".
Most users, even the bright, educated ones, see any antagonism for "cloud" as paranoia, even those who should know better.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @02:24AM (5 children)
No, I think you're wrong. We're the last generation that doesn't have a computer in our head.
And yeah, I can think of all sorts of evil/hacking/horrors that can happen with that, but I bet it's true. Who needs the cloud for storage, when you have every book, video, song stored in your head? Or whatever?
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:28AM
Got your Musk hub implanted yet?
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/07/18/elon-musk-wants-to-link-brains-directly-to-machines [economist.com]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @09:02AM (2 children)
If there will be a complete technical documentation allowing to audit the thing, open source software with possibility to expand, final solution of a power problem, a hardware kill-switch then... why not?
But what we see from mobile devices market, there will be documentation for developers only used only to force us buy certain products, software written by companies to put ads in our dreams and all attempts to implement a kill-switch would be illegal. Sorry, I'm going in this direction as much as I went with smartphones (checks what time is it on Nokia 6510) :).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @09:58AM (1 child)
Why not!?
I see you're referencing smart phones, and you're agreeing it's a "bad thing", but I have to still take exception at your line about how auditing would help. Or it being open source.
Because, how about #1, nothing is EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER secure. No auditing, no open source or not open source, no method of development, or QA as of yet, has EVER produced hack-proof, bug proof software. EVER!
If you don't consider every daemon, every piece of software, every operating system unsecure -- you're living in a fool's paradise. It's ALL buggy. It's ALL unsecure.
You see all those security vulnerabilities, for everything? You do realise that in many cases, those are exploited for days, months, sometimes YEARS, even DECADES yes DECADES by black hats to exploit systems! I'm talking about exploits that go unnoticed for 5 years, silently and judiciously used in quiet ways.
But you want this in your head? People hacking your ipv6 address, corrupting files/data? For this thing to work, there has to be a way to get data in and out, yes?
Imagine:
- if the thing is lined to your optic nerves, imagine constant messages flashing faster than your conscious mind can keep track of. Or while you sleep! Constantly!
- same is true of other methods. If you somehow develop a new method to communicate (like an extra sense, almost) with the thing, some other line of I/O, imagine while you sleep that constantly saying "OBEY" or whatever
Or how about it being used to track you, with GPSv3, and a network connection you can't shut off? How about it being used to manipulate you in countless other ways?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @10:46AM
I totally agree that these systems should be considered unsecure. But first of all, the hardware kill-switch. No, the toy we have with wi-fi, this is NOT a hardware killswitch. The real killswitch disconnects power and the chip is as useful as a brick.
A moment ago I read about these "latest" invention in brain-computer interface, and... Who the hell invented putting electrodes into brain IN 2019?! Are we in 1950s? Seriously, last time I was in BCIs (ca. 2004-2005) it was like MKG under hf current and it was working to the stage that it was possible to reproduce it in semi-lab conditions (I remember we used a trimmed-down design which was not published but could be reversed from source footage... from mid-1990s). To make a device to play "TV tennis" without hands, it was possible to use hardware which makes a typical ham radio enthusiast laugh, but this was still working, without putting electrodes into brain, with a 5cm-wide band around head. The side effects were not that bad (sea sickness symptoms after 30 minutes of continuous use, but these were mostly related to the "flashes", a smaller side effect).
Now I read more and more about this newest "invention" and I still cannot understand why the hell they are using these wires. Is it a form of human-computer Tivoization?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 27 2019, @10:14AM
There will be a computer in your head, but the information will not be stored there. It will be stored in the cloud. Better don't ever go to a place without a decent network connection.
There will exist upgrades with local storage. But those upgrades will be very expensive, and normal people won't be able to afford them. People who have to work in places without proper network connection will get them through the company, possibly just borrowed for the time of their job. And of course if you're rich, you'll always be able to afford it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday July 27 2019, @10:04AM
Do you need the latest version of Linux for legacy floppy-using machines?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 28 2019, @02:39AM
I have a USB floppy drive that so far has destroyed no disks (occasionally used for a floppy boot, tho I have some old disks that need reading) ... but the drive inside is a Teac, which may make a difference. Or it may be your OS and its drivers are the culprit.
I've noticed that this USB floppy drive read a boot disk about 4x faster than a drive on the FDD port... guess that tells us where the bottleneck was...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ledow on Sunday July 28 2019, @07:59AM
Almost all MIDI instruments that used floppies for instrument banks etc. have a "floppy driver emulator".
Usually a literal hardware replacement for a floppy drive, indistinguishable from a real floppy drive, that uses microSD cards to actually hold the data (and changing discs is done from an LCD panel on the front by selecting a different image file from the microSD.
Retro gamers have been building and selling the same things for their systems forever too.
There's no reason to be using an *actual* floppy drive any more... and they are just as likely to fail as the discs themselves.
Do yourself a favour, take out the drive, check the interface (IDE, etc.) and see if you can use a floppy emulator with it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by mhajicek on Saturday July 27 2019, @02:19AM
There are a great number of CNC machines still in service that load their programs (and sometimes their OS!) from floppies. Many of these machines still have a value of tens of thousands or more on the used market, and replacement costs of hundreds of thousands.Tyoical service lives are 20-30 years, sometimes more if well cared for.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday July 27 2019, @05:43AM (2 children)
I'm in category 1.
At a rough (mental) count, I've got five 5 1/4 drives, and six 3 1/2 drives. Many are kept as spares.
I've never seen an 8 inch one in the flesh, I'm a bit too young (or unlucky) for that.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 28 2019, @02:41AM
I've got a similar collection... tho I did thin things down when I moved, and only kept the Teacs (and whatever was in random PCs of uncertain heritage). Have yet to see a Teac FDD fail, even under hard and regular use; have seen a few dead Sonys and a whole lot of dead Mitsumis.
So was pleased to note that the no-name USB unit I bought a while back has a Teac FDD inside.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28 2019, @10:07AM
How many still have write rings laying around?
(Score: 2) by corey on Saturday July 27 2019, @09:00AM
3) You maintain/support/upgrade military systems which usually have a life of type of up to 20 plus years. Obsolescence issues due to the use of floppies is usually pretty minor though.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Nuke on Saturday July 27 2019, @09:03AM (3 children)
4) You still have documents and stuff that were saved on floppies years ago that you must get round to copying off one day.
(Score: 3, Funny) by acid andy on Saturday July 27 2019, @10:41AM (2 children)
Yeah I thought of that too but unfortunately for us it's already covered under:
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 28 2019, @02:43AM (1 child)
The really scary thing is ... we have data on floppy disks that are older than most of the people posting here...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29 2019, @04:26PM
And if you haven't used it in decades, what are the odds you ever will?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday July 27 2019, @10:06AM
Motherboards, RasPis, etc. are still coming out with USB Type-A ports. Maybe these will fall out of use and get replaced by Type-C, but USB itself will be around for a long time.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @02:03PM
Add to those two
3. Musician with a keyboard with a floppy drive...(thankfully there are replacement SD card 'solutions')
Dare I mention that I also have a Sony digital camera with a floppy disk drive? (fully functional, 'joke' birthday present last year from one of my sisters...)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:15PM
They have a very simplified controller that can only handle PC style floppy formats, and next to no or no error recovery capabilities.
With a normal 26 pin floppy drive there are some tricks you can do with access to the floppy port for some levels of recovery, and with the drive itself there are various flux systems to recover disks of the majority of formats out there, utilizing a standard PC compatible 5.25 or 3.5 floppy drive.
The loss of floppy drive support because 'omg bitrot might happen' is a sign of the failure of linux, after 30 years, to have any form of stable ABI. It's not like the systems that have 26 pin floppy or IDE interfaces have changed in the intervening decades. For hardware and software purposes they were almost exactly the same up until the final two or three generations of x86_64 PCs when they broke all that legacy stuff at the chipset level thanks to HPET or APIC changes which interfered. Since both AMD and Intel did it within one generation of each other, I can only assume it was collusion to try and provide an excuse to eliminate these old ports from modern systems.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Sunday July 28 2019, @01:51AM
Maybe your old computer is too old to have USB?
If you cannot find an old server, maybe it got sealed inside a wall . . .
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/ [theregister.co.uk]
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Unixnut on Sunday July 28 2019, @11:36AM
> The next real moment for us is when they retire the first USB interface, leaving millions of tons of old USB storage/devices unsupported. That will be slightly more impactful than the loss of a floppy that 99% of people haven't used since the Matrix movies first came out.
I really doubt that will happen. The day they retire the first USB interface is the day USB itself gets retired.
USB 1.1 is still used for its original purpose (replacement for PS2, rs232, etc...), most commonly for keyboards, mice and other input devices. Every generation of USB after that up to the latest is backwards compatible with the USB1.1 standard.
The one thing that may change is that the old rectangular USB physical interface may change, but as all the standards are backward compatible electrically, all you would need is an adapter to make use of all the old USB hardware kicking around.
USB after all, stands for "Universal Serial Bus", and its well on its way to becoming truly universal. I don't see it going away anytime soon.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday July 27 2019, @01:35AM (14 children)
At my company, we still have terminals (real ones, namely VT220s), they still work with Linux, and we still use them to issue the odd shell commands to our Dell servers without having to open the air-conditioned server room from the room next to it. They've been paid for 35 years ago, and a RS232-USB cable is cheaper than a laptop to do what we do with them. Beat that for legacy support...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @01:56AM (4 children)
At my company, we still use TRS-80 II's with cassette drives as servers for the Windows 10 updates.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:17AM (2 children)
That’s about 40,000 cassettes. I hope you have a robo-deck loader.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Saturday July 27 2019, @07:43AM
Fuck you.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:57PM
That's why updates are so slow.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:16PM
I scrolled all the way down here to find someone who remembers cload - and here you are trying to bullshit all of us professional bullshitters. Nahhhh - points plus for remembering, but points minus for the absurdity of using cassettes for modern day upgrades.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @06:08AM (3 children)
You mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it? What, your company has intelligent asset management or something? Radicals!
I'm a bit surprised the VT220s themselves still work tho. Screens burned much?
I'm sure you know that an old junker PC running a terminal emulator (was it Procomm Plus I used a lot? ... ) would replace any VT220s that were not worth fixing.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Sunday July 28 2019, @01:54AM (2 children)
If it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28 2019, @03:32AM
I live my life by that motto. ...There are whole categories of heavy equipment I'm not allowed to touch anymore...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29 2019, @04:30PM
- Found the java dev!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Saturday July 27 2019, @07:38AM (4 children)
Like you, I still have working 5.25" and floppy drives and blank spare disks for both. I have a working Z80 system that is still usable (for some definitions of 'usable'). I have backed up all my software to more modern devices but the Z80 uses 5.25" disks and a cassette recorder for data! The entire system would probably live inside a single chip nowadays, and it is left in the dust by a RasPi. I built it from parts during the early to mid 1980s - soldering over 8000 pins.
But as a teaching aid it is irreplaceable. Some people still want to know 'how' things work rather than just accept that if something breaks you just replace the entire board.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday July 28 2019, @01:52AM (3 children)
Wow! Impressive project.
Your post gave me personal insight. I did more electronics projects as a kid. I started working as a tech at 17, went full-time until college at 23, and now only do small things here and there. Now I realize why- I've gotten paid to solder 8000 pins! I guess that takes some of the fun out of it. I wonder if GoFundMe will pay me to do my projects again.
So what OS do you run on the Z80? CP/M? Or no OS?
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday July 28 2019, @06:33AM (2 children)
CP/M is the default used to interface with the disk drives etc. But as an alternative I can boot into a command line and use assembler and the routines provided by an on-board ROM which is limited to interfacing to the keyboard and the cassette player/recorder. It has a memory of 64k RAM now, but started life with a 2k ROM, 1k of system memory/video RAM, and just under 1k of user RAM!
People are always amazed by what can actually be achieved with such a small amount of user memory. They always 'correct' me by telling me that I meant to say 64Mb or even 64Gb! Assembler is the most efficient in terms of memory usage, but I also have Pascal, Modula2 and one or two other compilers available when using CP/M.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday July 29 2019, @12:49AM (1 child)
Again, very cool. My first microprocessor system was a Kim-1 - 6502 based.
I used to use CP/M way back in the day- one system was an Osborne-1, which I liked, and another I can't remember the brand name, but it had 2 Z80s.
I did some Pascal in college, and may have had Turbo Pascal somewhere, but never used it post college. Is it fairly efficient on the Z80? (output small?)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Monday July 29 2019, @09:41AM
It's been a while since I programmed in Pascal - if I do anything on the Z80 I use assembly language. I cannot remember which compiler I last used. I have Turbo Pascal and another from one of the US universities, possibly MIT. I cannot say how it compares with today's compilers but I do remember that when I got my first compiler (Pascal-Z80 or Pascal-80?) I was very impressed but I don't think that I have a copy of that compiler on disk.
Modula-2 was also good but is a language that is rarely used nowadays.
My primary language now is Python 3 but I haven't bothered looking if anyone has been daft enough to try to port it to the Z80. I would imagine that would be an almost impossible task.
As I say, the Z80 computer is primarily used as a teaching aid, but it does record local weather conditions via an interface card - for no other reason than I can, and it demonstrates that even the old CPUs can still carry out useful tasks and shouldn't be forgotten. If somebody is starting out today I would probably recommend a RaspPi for doing similar tasks and a lot of other jobs too that the Z80 would struggle with.
Hobbyists tended to either be in the Z80/8080 camp or the 6502 camp. There was much (friendly) rivalry and banter between the various user groups with each CPU having some strong points where it scored over the other. I note that the Z80 is still being manufactured under various names, I'll have to see if the 6502 has had similar good fortune. I can see plenty of 6502 programming books but a quick search hasn't revealed any chips yet.
I'd better get back to trimming my grey beard and oiling my knee and hip joints now.....
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Saturday July 27 2019, @01:46AM (17 children)
Note to Linus: Don't have a floppy drive? Buy one! Better yet, buy a dozen!
A PC just isn't a PC without a floppy drive.
Ironically, on the very original IBM 5150, having no floppy drive was a valid option. Of course, then you were left with nothing but ROM basic and the cassette tape interface port. That configuration mainly existed so IBM could advertise a low cost base model that technically "worked". A few people probably bought that configuration and added their own floppy dives.
(I haven't checked lately, is there even any BIOS compatiblity left in currently sold new hardware? That was the last trace of "IBM PC compatiblity" and I know manufacturers were trying to ditch it)
I have a couple of the last consumer motherboards that were sold with real FDCs. A ASRock 990FX Extreme 4, Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3, and an ASRock 880GM-LE FX. I'd think those should run current Linux fine, but it would suck not have my floppy drives work. If anyone knows of any newer boards with real FDCs, please say so.
Most USB floppy drives were pure crap from day one. They can't read non-standard disk geometry like Microsoft's DMF formatted 3.5" disks. They can't deal with copy protection. And many of them don't even support 720k low density, even though they are supposed to.
There are several current alternatives to interfacing with floppy drives: The Kryoflux, and the SuperCard Pro. However, these are not friendly drag-and-drop solutions, they are intended for flux-level archival and can archive ANY format that fits in the floppy drive including Apple II and Macintosh GCR.
The last time I checked, Windows 10 still worked with real floppy drives, but with how they break everything and force updates every week, I'll have to check again.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mth on Saturday July 27 2019, @02:12AM (4 children)
I think the drive isn't the problem, but the availability of floppy disk controllers. For example, I have several spare floppy drives, but no floppy drive in my new PC because the motherboard doesn't have a connector for it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Saturday July 27 2019, @02:33AM (3 children)
Exactly, lobotomized modern motherboards lack a Floppy Disk Controller chip. Of course, no FDC, no drive.
There has been lots of talk about creating a PCI device with a FDC chip, but PCI does not support the method of DMA access that a 100% compatible floppy controller requires.
It is possible to create a BIOS-level compatible floppy drive. Motherboards will do that with USB floppy drives. But that does not give you the full compatiblity with programs that access the floppy controller directly.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:25AM (2 children)
Well, if it works, that's great. Seems simpler to just keep an old computer or two around.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:42AM (1 child)
Exactly, I still have old computers that (say Win 95 to XP) that can still read (and edit) 3.5 in floppy's. You could put a lot of words on 1.4 MB, but not much music or video. So even though I (for some weird reason) still have boxes of plastic cases of 3.5 floppy's that I long ago transferred to CD R/W and backup hard drives, I can still access the data through my current machines with various OSes.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @05:55AM
I keep a few things most people toss. Not that much, but it's easier to store it than scramble and panic when you need it. I have XT class motherboards. If I get spare time I'll test them and sell them to people who like playing old games on genuine old hardware. There's a market.
I recently got an engineering / tech. gig (long story) where a guy passed away 4 years ago. Very small company. Still trying to reverse-engineer what he was doing to make the products. Very low-volume, high cost. Very specialized industry. Designed in early 80s, certified, written in stone. Any change would involve years of paperwork, tests, approvals, and tens of thousands of dollars. Not going to happen.
I found a stack of 3.5" floppies that have mostly CAD files which include parts lists, etc. Fortunately I have quite a few 3.5" drives, but of course, many of the floppies would not read, or partially only. It was a trip down memory lane to find and use my old floppy repair utilities. Some of those utilities absolutely will not run in a Windows DOS box- must be real native DOS. Of course I have that. :) Tried FreeDOS (or whatever it is) and the utilities would NOT run- not even under MSDOS 7. Had to be 6.22 or lower. I certainly used a couple of Linux installs to try to read them.
Fortunately I'm a pretty good investigator / deducer and I finally found and pieced everything together, but a few significant clues came from the floppies.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:06AM (2 children)
Hell, optical is on the way out and that can still be marginally useful.
Make a 1 petabyte floppy disk and it can have a comeback.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @06:02AM (1 child)
I dunno about 1 PB floppies, but you reminded me that there were 120 MB floppies. I never even saw one. The Zip drives stole that market. I ended up with several of them but have never even used one.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:30PM
iOmega shot themselves in the foot by making multiple, incompatible drives. The 100mb Zip was very popular, I've got one of those, but the 250MB and 750 weren't really compatible and the Jaz drive was totally different. They also got a bad rap for the "click of death" and slow speeds with their parallel port drives (although the SCSI Zip 100 was blazing fast!) Plus there were piles of other random similar but incompatible competitors like the LS-120 and Caleb floptical. The market eventually had enough and bailed to USB flash, where there was no "drive" to become incompatible with. Although as others as mentioned now USB 1.x may be desupported soon.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by toddestan on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:33AM (6 children)
Hey, I actually have a Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3! I didn't buy it for the FDD controller, and it wasn't something I paid attention to either when I was researching it. So when I noticed it had one, I was like "how quaint"! By the way, it works fine with Slackware Linux, but I don't have anything hooked to the FDD controller so I can't speak to that.
At my previous job, we built equipment with embedded PCs, and for a short while we tried using Advantech industrial motherboards. In the interest of having the development machines be as similar as possible, I had a development PC with an AIMB-780 motherboard, which supported the first generation Core i3/i5/i7 chips. When I discovered it had a FDD controller, I went back into the scrap pile and nicked a 1.44" from P3-era system with a black case, and installed it in my work PC. Surprisingly it didn't get a lot of comments. By the way, those motherboards were junk, which is why we didn't stick with them for very long. Consumer-level stuff was more reliable and a heck of a lot cheaper.
Speaking of odd equipment, I also have a SOYO SY-P4I845PEISA, which as you might guess from the name, is a P4 motherboard with EISA slots. I got it from a machine that was being scrapped (along with some ISA data acquisition cards), but have never done anything with it.
I also agree about USB floppy drives being junk. Finding one that supports anything other that 1.44MB DOS formatted disks is rare. I had no idea what all the Mac users did back in 1998 - sure you could add a USB floppy to your iMac, but the vast majority of them would not read Mac-formatted disks. Buy I a PC I guess.
I've also never seen a USB 5.25" floppy drive either. If you want to read your old 5.25" floppies your only real option is to find an old PC with a working drive, then figure out how to get the data off of that PC to a modern one.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:49AM (5 children)
USB isn't compatible with the 5.25 disk control system.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday July 27 2019, @05:48AM (4 children)
Isn't it the (lobotomised) floppy controllers in the USB floppy drives that only support 3 1/2" varieties?
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:40PM (3 children)
Correct, the USB floppy specification only defines 1.44mb, 720k, and Japanese "mode 3" 3.5" floppy disk types.
5.25" drives are a little more complicated, as then you have to worry about 1.2mb, 360k, 320k, 180k, 160k, and other non-standard and copy protected formats used in earlier IBM PCs.
But as mentioned, the typcial solutions for these these days are flux level copiers like the Kryoflux and SuperCard Pro.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @10:57PM (1 child)
How much worry is there? AFAIK it is just number of tracks, step size, head count, modulation and maybe sector count.
(Score: 1) by jrmcferren on Monday July 29 2019, @08:00PM
That covers all of the double density types, but you also have to account for the rotational speed difference for 1.2M high density drives, even a high density drive with a double density disk requires different timing due to the disk rotating 60 RPM faster.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 05 2019, @12:26AM
I once saw a PC with a 720K 5.25 inch FDD.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Sunday July 28 2019, @02:57AM (1 child)
So, about the USB FDD controllers... is that distinct from the drive itself? Mine is a no-name but has a Teac FDD inside... have not had occasion to read odd disks with it. (It is much faster than an onboard controller, tho..)
BTW for everyone who takes a notion to read old floppies on a Windows system newer than W98, and doesn't always remember to write-protect them first -- you'll want to add this to your registry to avoid fucking up the volume track (which will make the diskette unreadable back on the older system, and may make it play dead until reformatted):
No Volume Track fix
==============
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NoVolTrack]
"MPC-60"=hex:03,00,4d,50,43,36,30,20,20
"MPC2000"=hex:03,00,4d,50,43,32,30,30,30
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28 2019, @03:53PM
What is this "volume track" thing?
(Score: 5, Funny) by black6host on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:30AM (12 children)
This is how life goes: You get older, they take away your floppy drives. To make up for it, other things get floppy. It sucks :)
(Score: 3, Funny) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @05:39AM (11 children)
Did you have to add "It sucks" to that?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @05:43AM (10 children)
Sometimes it helps to make it less floppy. But not always.
(Score: 3, Funny) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @06:29AM (9 children)
> But not always.
Ahh. The blue pill crowd.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Sunday July 28 2019, @01:56AM (8 children)
Cialis is a yellow pill.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday July 28 2019, @05:16AM (7 children)
I wouldn't know, Danny Boy. I know, you've seen them in the ads, right? Your friends use them. Yeah, that's it.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 29 2019, @02:07PM
No. I use them. So I know what color they are. They're great.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 29 2019, @04:53PM (5 children)
Another thing I remembered that is useful. I had posted this previously some months back in an SN thread that went off topic about boner drugs.
Unlike those blue pills, the yellow pill is good for 36 hours. Take it Friday night, it's still good Sunday morning.
If you're over a certain age, you can probably get the prescription from your regular doctor just by asking.
They are not magic. They just make things work better.
Another thing that the yellow pill makes work better is your urine stream. It will come out like you were a 20 year old spring chicken again.
Everyone gets old. If you're lucky. It will happen to you too. You won't be twenty forever. Yes, really. And I promise you this: you'll get old much faster than you think. You won't believe how fast it will happen.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 30 2019, @03:41AM (4 children)
I was giving you an opening to make a crack something like: "well, at least I have a reason to use them" or some such... :-}
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 30 2019, @01:48PM (3 children)
You don't need much of a reason to obtain or use them. They're great even if you don't need them. But, the older you get, the less inhibited you get about using them.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 30 2019, @02:42PM (2 children)
Very interesting re: urine stream. I hadn't heard that. My dad takes a med. for urine stream, but it's also causing him incontinence (he's pretty elderly). I wonder if the Cialis is cheaper, fewer side effects, etc. His urologist is suggesting a "uro-lift", and if he gets otherwise stable, it'll be the next step. Thanks!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 30 2019, @05:55PM (1 child)
I have a friend (really) who takes it for that purpose. I take it for its intended purpose. I don't know of any bad side effects, but see below. It is unlikely to be cheaper. I'm lucky that insurance covers it. My doctor was surprised at that.
If you take Cialis (or the generic, which recently became available), and if you coincidentally (unrelated to the drug) have any chest pains, be sure to let the doctors know. (The prescribing doctor is supposed to mention this.) One common immediate treatment for chest pains might be nitrates (I think) which do not go well with Cialis. They would need to use a different treatment.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 30 2019, @06:25PM
I'll ask my dad's urologist. He's on Flowmax now, but again, the urologist (top top doc) recommends the uro-lift. I don't want to think about such things until I _must_. Ugh.
(Score: 2, Funny) by The Vocal Minority on Saturday July 27 2019, @05:32AM (7 children)
Thinks to self - "Do I still have a floppy drive in my home PC?"
Opens front door of case - sees 3.5 inch floppy drive.
*shaking fist in anger* "Damn you Linus!"
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:27PM (6 children)
No need to open front door - I just lean sideways, and, yes, that old floppy drive is the top-most in a column of 13 drive bays. But, I've disabled the floppy in the BIOS, since it takes time during bootup. TBH, I'm not even sure the thing is plugged in. But, yes, it still lives there, the king of the hill.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:51PM (5 children)
Does the OS see the floppy drive, in spite of BIOS disable? I'm curious that the BIOS would disable the controller chip entirely.
I know some BIOSes would allow you to disable the extremely annoying floppy seek test, but keep the floppy visible during boot.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 27 2019, @05:19PM (4 children)
I'm unsure whether Linux could find the drive. It doesn't show up in any file manager, at least by default. Hmmmm - devices? Nothing there, USB, and ATA devices, nothing like an FDC. I think the BIOS has it completely blocked. With a little research, I might be able to find and mount the disk drive, I can't say for certain.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @06:08PM (3 children)
I don't know if this will work with your kernel / distro / device name system, but it can't hurt.
Do "ls -l /dev/fd0*" in a terminal / command prompt. If /dev/fd0u1440 is there, that's it. If others are listed, they're just different device names for the same floppy drive, and they tell the driver to use whatever the format definition is based on that name.
For example, the 1440 means 1440 "blocks" which are 1024 bytes (2 sectors generally). It works out to 40 cylinders of 18 sectors on 2 sides. That's what DOS expects, although it can read other formats too.
The other dev names show the other formats possible. I think a floppy could have as many as 24 sectors per track (hence the 1920 driver name).
Way back in the day I was a glutton for punishment and had found a tiny DOS utility that would allow DOS to read and write more floppy sectors. IIRC, I would get 1.9 MB / floppy 100% reliably, and the utility could be on the first sectors of the floppy and you could run it and see the rest of the drive.
I do not miss those days.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 28 2019, @01:28AM (2 children)
$ ls -l /dev/fd0*
ls: cannot access '/dev/fd0*': No such file or directory
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday July 28 2019, @01:55AM (1 child)
I shoulda added, maybe ls -l /dev/fd*, but if dev 0 ain't there, ...
But some distros / kernels might use a different system altogether. Which distro + kernel version?
And you can't just turn off the floppy seek in BIOS, but leave floppy on?
But maybe you don't use floppies anymore...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 28 2019, @02:32AM
inxi
CPU: 2x 6-Core AMD Opteron 8439 SE (-MCP SMP-) speed: 2815 MHz
Kernel: 4.18.0-20.2-liquorix-amd64 x86_64 Up: 2d 6h 04m
Mem: 8930.0/24107.3 MiB (37.0%) Storage: 223.57 GiB (75.4% used) Procs: 361
Shell: bash 5.0.0 inxi: 3.0.30
I've liked the Liquorix kernel since I discovered it. :^)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @05:34AM (1 child)
I still use music equipment mfgd in the 1980 to 2000 period.
A Yamaha QX1 uses 5-1/4 DSDD
A Yamaha QX3 uses 3-1/2 DSDD
A Yamaha DX7II uses 3-1/2 DSDD
AN EMU E4K and/or E4XT Ultra uses a 3-1/2 DSHD
Even A few years ago I had to search to find the script MAKEFLOPPIES that adds the /dev entries
I doubt the floppy code needs to be "maintained". Its been in use for a long time.
Fortunately for me, the floppy drive that comes standard in a Dell GX280 can read and write
3-1/2 DSDD and DSHD disks properly and do a low level format (since soft sectored).
And I second the comment about the CNC machines with floppy drives ...
(Score: 2) by deadstick on Saturday July 27 2019, @01:41PM
I had the dubious fortune of porting a couple of Adventure International games from Commodore to Atari. IIRC, the first shipload of Commodore drives had a 100% failure rate in the medium term...the head alignment depended on a single screw trying to clamp a rotary load.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by chewbacon on Saturday July 27 2019, @06:10AM
I remember when Apple dropped the floppy from the iMac and the world lost its mind over it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @06:28AM (9 children)
I just spent the last few days imaging my 8 bit and PC floppies, and the 5.25s imaged with hardly any problems. The 3.5s on the other hand have been a major bitch with tons of read errors, spinning issues and the drive even has developed problems.
Hell, even in their time, they were constantly failing. Looking back, I didn't realize at the time that it was such a great change to not have to use them. For a small bit of time I was using CDs to store data externally, then it was USB sticks.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @06:38AM (8 children)
Above I mention recently inheriting some important floppies. Some would read on some drives I have, some not at all. Many of my drives don't seem to work at all (anymore) on test floppies. They spin cleanly, stall, then you get data error message. Not sure what's failing- they're clean, undamaged, everything is set correctly. Frustrating! I've had many optical drives and players die- the lasers seem to have limited life, but there's nothing in a floppy drive that would electrically "wear out" (no bad caps). Trying to find test / calibration / alignment info...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:27PM (7 children)
Also the cheap plastic lenses degrades and becomes too lossy. Older glass ones won't.
Well, the heads also age and some can accumulate magnetic debris in their air gap. The plastic gears and the lube dries out, the magnets lose strength...
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:36PM
Very interesting, I did not know that. Makes sense for sure. My main stereo rack CD player is an early 80s Magnavox that still works almost perfectly. Sometimes laser "head" flutters, but I'm too lazy to try to fix it. I just power cycle it, open / close tray, try again, or give up and do something else. Maybe it needs alignment / calibration- I doubt any caps have died.
I know about all of those things and keep them clean and carefully lubed (I'm real good at that sort of thing). Carefully blow out any dust, and most of mine are very clean inside.
BTW, heads don't have an "air gap" or it would fill with debris. There's a magnetic insulator of some kind, but never air. It's more that the head can accumulate a buildup of debris which causes the tape / disk to become distant from the gap. I've never seen any kind of wear or buildup on a floppy head, but I carefully clean them anyway.
Many tape heads can become permanently magnetized, so there exist head demagnetizers, of which I have 2 or 3. In a floppy the magnetic pole piece is made of ferrite which doesn't typically retain magnetism, and even if it did, the electromagnetic energy would remove it instantly during operation. Can't hurt to degauss them and try anyway...
Not sure which magnets you refer to... Typically 2 motors, spin and head carriage movement and they work perfectly...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:53PM (5 children)
From my own experience, the main killers are rust/corrosion due to poor storage, and failing capacitors. Well, when they were commonly in use the #1 killer were the retarded monkey fuck users that wouldn't follow simple usage and care directions.
IBM PS/2 systems are plauged with failing capacitors, and their drives were a proprietary form factor, so they can't easily be replaced.
On the other hand, find a Fujitsu M2551A with no corrosion, and it will almost certainly work fine.
Broken plastic gears are mainly a problem with very early drives, especially in Macintosh 128k/512k/Plus machines.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @07:33PM (4 children)
Good info, thanks.
No corrosion in any of mine.
Dust has been the biggest problem in my experience. Coming from some background in higher-end equipment, it always really bugged me that PCs suck dirt and dust into the drives. I'm used to equipment sucking air in, usually in the back, through a FILTER. People with HVAC generally have much dustier computers. I have air compressors and blow guns. Of course the dust sticks to the gears and lead screws, so deeper cleaning and re-greasing is necessary.
Very little experience working on Mac drives, but I suspect it's the motorized eject that gets the broken gears.
I always had best luck with Teac drives, but many others were great. I'll look to see if I have any of the Fujitsu, and thanks again.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 28 2019, @03:11AM (3 children)
Teac for 3.5", Fujitsu for 5.25"
Never seen a deader of either. Seen deaders of other brands.
Dunno about Mac FDDs but some CDROMs of similar vintage used a teeny tiny belt to open the tray. Belt dries out and breaks, no more tray open... tho could probably fix it with a suitable rubber band.
The way to keep dust and lint and cat hair out of the drives (floppy or optical) is to have one more intake fan than you have outgoing fans. Higher air pressure inside the case means air constantly flowing out every crack and crevice, including the mouths of these drives. (Even when I lived in dust-and-cat-hair-central, this kept my drives crud-free.) Whereas if you have equal or fewer intake fans... air flows IN those drive mouths, bringing along every passing bit of floating crud.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28 2019, @03:57PM (2 children)
I have a 3" floppy drive that was belt driven, and the belt disintegrated. I know the specs, but I'm having the hardest time finding a replacement in the US.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday July 29 2019, @12:56AM (1 child)
Check with these guys: http://www.russellind.com/prbline/prb.htm [russellind.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29 2019, @02:22PM
Thank you for that link. I'll see if the conversion from metric comes up with something close in their catalog.