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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: 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
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  • (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.