It's 2021 And The Linux Kernel's Floppy Driver Is Still Seeing The Occasional Patch

[ssokolow]

Real fun is booting Linux and create funny filenames like a: b: and c: on the windows filesystem and see weird stuff happening in windows.
Unless they have fixed it now.

Likewise for taking advantage of how NTFS supports case-sensitive filenames or how some MacOS configurations get very confused if you force filenames with the wrong Unicode normal form.

[ssokolow]

I remember having to obtain a copy of one of the floppies for install because of corruption. I think the official disks were hard fixed against writing, so checking them for repair wasn't an option.

Yeah. As a kid, it didn't occur to me that a piece of electrical tape should do the trick.

You have an interesting definition of fun. I went from what three floppies for Windows for Workgroups (Windows 3.11) to 30 something for Windows 95?

Eight. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 came on eight disks.

(Windows 3.1 came on seven, though the last disk was optional printer drivers.)

[gamerk2]

I wonder if somebody still has (or even uses!) a punched card reader...

*waves*

Support one of those at work for a production machine; it's sitting right next to the PDP-11 and the DEC computer, both still hanging on (barely).

And no, I'm being totally serious here.

[gamerk2]

Real fun is booting Linux and create funny filenames like a: b: and c: on the windows filesystem and see weird stuff happening in windows.
Unless they have fixed it now.

To be fair, those names (along with stuff like COM1) are hardcoded and reserved for legacy purposes; stuff is going to break if you try and force feed those names in.

[f0rmat]

*waves*

Support one of those at work for a production machine; it's sitting right next to the PDP-11 and the DEC computer, both still hanging on (barely).

And no, I'm being totally serious here.

A PDP-11? Wow - do you use it to program controllers in native assembly language? What is the other DEC? Is it an Ultrix workstation or one of the VAX/VMS series? I used to work on both in graduate school. I also once had to port FORTRAN II code from a PDP-11 to FORTRAN IV code to a VAX 9000 because the University was getting rid of it's last PHP-11.

[f0rmat]

Yeah. As a kid, it didn't occur to me that a piece of electrical tape should do the trick.



Eight. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 came on eight disks.

(Windows 3.1 came on seven, though the last disk was optional printer drivers.)

Thanks for the correction...the memory is not what it used to be.

[stiiixy]

Yeah. As a kid, it didn't occur to me that a piece of electrical tape should do the trick.



Eight. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 came on eight disks.

(Windows 3.1 came on seven, though the last disk was optional printer drivers.)

Yeah sire the tape worked on a floppy if you wanted to overwrite it, but these paeticular ones were byte locked somehow, and I wasn't interested in farting about when I had a CD and unlocked floppies anyway.

[ssokolow]

Yeah sire the tape worked on a floppy if you wanted to overwrite it, but these paeticular ones were byte locked somehow, and I wasn't interested in farting about when I had a CD and unlocked floppies anyway.

Ahh. Yes. I forgot that Microsoft was dabbling in formats like DMF which pack more data onto floppy disks but tend to make them behave more like writing an ISO to a CD-RW. (ie. immutable/read-only unless you wipe the disk and re-image it.)

[ssokolow]

To be fair, those names (along with stuff like COM1) are hardcoded and reserved for legacy purposes; stuff is going to break if you try and force feed those names in.

Technically, it is possible to make them work... even on Windows... you just need to bypass the Win32 path translation layer and speak NT kernel internal paths. (Which things like Explorer don't do.)

Project Zero - The Definitive Guide on Win32 to NT Path Conversion

(Heck, because it uses counted strings like Pascal or Rust, the NT kernel's object manager (essentially a VFS) even allows NULL in paths.)

[7ronic]

Floppy is a strange thing. Windows 10 does not support them

Windows 10 does support floppy drives.