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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: 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.