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posted by martyb on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the retro-things dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Saturday July 27 2019, @01:46AM (17 children)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Saturday July 27 2019, @01:46AM (#871704)

    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.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by mth on Saturday July 27 2019, @02:12AM (4 children)

    by mth (2848) on Saturday July 27 2019, @02:12AM (#871713) Homepage

    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)

      by SomeGuy (5632) on Saturday July 27 2019, @02:33AM (#871724)

      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)

        by RS3 (6367) on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:25AM (#871741)

        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)

          by captain normal (2205) on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:42AM (#871769)

          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.

          --
          When life isn't going right, go left.
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @05:55AM

            by RS3 (6367) on Saturday July 27 2019, @05:55AM (#871789)

            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)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:06AM (#871753) Journal

    A PC just isn't a PC without a floppy drive.

    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)

      by RS3 (6367) on Saturday July 27 2019, @06:02AM (#871792)

      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

        by SomeGuy (5632) on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:30PM (#871885)

        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)

    by toddestan (4982) on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:33AM (#871765)

    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)

      by mhajicek (51) on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:49AM (#871774)

      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)

        by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 27 2019, @05:48AM (#871785)

        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)

          by SomeGuy (5632) on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:40PM (#871888)

          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)

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @10:57PM (#872123)

            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

              by jrmcferren (5500) on Monday July 29 2019, @08:00PM (#872789) Homepage

              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

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 05 2019, @12:26AM (#875729)

            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)

    by Reziac (2489) on Sunday July 28 2019, @02:57AM (#872171) Homepage

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28 2019, @03:53PM (#872312)

      What is this "volume track" thing?