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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:30PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:30PM (#871884)

    I'd put cassette tape at a similar realibility level than 3-1/2 floppies.

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:33PM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:33PM (#871968) Journal

    I'm with GP. I think cassette is superior to floppies. I never lost data on a cassette, but I've lost a lot of data on floppies. But, floppies pushed cassette aside, because floppies were blazing fast, in comparison.

    • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 28 2019, @03:23AM

      by Reziac (2489) on Sunday July 28 2019, @03:23AM (#872177) Homepage

      There were vast reliability differences among floppies. 1.44mb were pretty good; 720k were horrible. 360k were very stable; 1.2mb not so much. (This is perhaps a little better than anecdotal, since it's the result of reading several hundred of each, all of similar history and vintage. Well, some of the 360k were a lot older.) Also varied wildly by brand... I got to where I'd only buy Sony for archival use, tho I'd also use TDK for daily stuff. Those Sony disks almost never failed.

      And of course who can forget the super-durable AOL disks. (Out of floppies? Call up AOL and ask for their software! You'd soon have a regular supply arriving by mail.)

      See above about the main cause of 'failed' floppies since WinXP... the volume track function, which renders them unreadable on older systems.

      --
      And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:00PM (#871984)

    You may be right there. Of course the floppy holds much more data than a cassette, but I still don't know why back in the 8 bit days there wasn't more use of (cheap) compression and error correction. I remember I used somebody's RLE library in the 80s to provide illustrations for a text adventure, but never saw compression in any loader of the time. The fancy loaders did put a lot of effort in getting cool color banding effects based on the audio though.