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

[phoronix]

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

The Linux kernel's floppy driver dates back to the original days of the kernel back in 1991 and is still being maintained thirty years later with the occasional fix...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Floppy-Driver-In-2021

[ALRBP]

Floppy is a strange thing. Windows 10 does not support them but the drives letters "A" and "B" are still reserved for them and when I want to save something on most software (some have changed but not most) I still click on a floppy (even on my smartphone, a technology popularized after floppy became obsolete). It's like the ghost of floppy was still in every computer, years after floppy's death.

I am probably one of the youngest people who know what a floppy is and actually used them in "production" (not professional use, I was too young). I still have old floppies somewhere in a box, but I wonder what does that strange floppy symbol means for younger people who never used floppy. Everyone knows it's the "save" symbol but for people who may never have seen a real floppy in their lives, the feeling must be different.

[Etherman]

My old neighbor did mail floppies written on his old i386(!) to tax authorities until about ~2015 when they stopped accepting them.

[programmerjake]

I still have a 3.5" floppy drive lying around for if I ever need it...
Reminds me of several years ago (2010?) I borrowed my dad's 5.25" floppy drive to read a floppy from a book I found.

[CochainComplex]

Who appreciates the sound of it ? I love the sound of old Mac 3,5" floppies read/write. On windows computers it used to sound a bit like screaming but on mac it was more dull and dampend. BTW Sony was the manufacturing company of them afaik.

[tildearrow]

I remember openSUSE not booting on my server due to the floppy controller being on...

[cl333r]

Everyone knows it's the "save" symbol but for people who may never have seen a real floppy in their lives, the feeling must be different.

Same for the "alarm clock" symbol.

[klapaucius]

My first floppy disk drive was this one, and its disks where really floppy. It was also way faster and reliable that the datasette.

[f0rmat]

I still have the floppy that has my copy of my Master's Thesis on it - written using TeX. I also have another with the old Macintosh games Poon and SimCity and Tetris. I guess I need to dig out my old Toshiba external floppy drive (USB 1.1) and move all of that stuff to more modern hardware.

[ALRBP]

Same for the "alarm clock" symbol.

True.

I actually own a modern version of those old-school alarm clocks (cheap and definitely much less resilient than the old ones ; it stopped working due to low quality plastic, despite my efforts to fix it, maybe I could find a better one).