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The Floppy Disk Orphaned By Linux

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

DannyB writes:

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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @01:56AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @01:56AM (#871707)

    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)

    by pipedwho (2032) on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:17AM (#871759)

    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

      by Bot (3902) on Saturday July 27 2019, @07:43AM (#871810) Journal

      Fuck you.

      --
      Account abandoned.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:57PM (#871982)

      That's why updates are so slow.

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:16PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:16PM (#871951) Journal

    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.