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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: 2) by choose another one on Saturday July 27 2019, @10:27AM (1 child)
> From what I hear, 8" floppies are the minimum, as is an owner at least 6' tall.
Yeah, but on the other hand those 8" floppies had to be inserted real gently into the slot, otherwise they got bent or broken
The 3.5s may have been much smaller, but because they were stiffer you could bang em in as hard as you wanted
What you really wanted of course was an 8in hard one, they were called "winchesters" for some reason, I can still remember the first one of those I had, all 20megs of it...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28 2019, @04:40AM
Speak for yourself...did they come in black?