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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: 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.