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

[stiiixy]

Installing Windows 95 from thirty+ floppies was fun.

[ssokolow]

I have two USB floppy drives. (Tiny calibration differences make a big difference on reading marginal sectors and what one drive has trouble with, the other usually reads without issue and vice-versa.)

One of my younger brothers moved back in to cut costs and improve his mental health during COVID, so I'll try to remember to ask to borrow his Windows 10 PC for a moment once we're both awake at the same time.

Yep. A: and B: as expected.

https://imgur.com/a/xRb504Y

Makes me wish I had a third one just for the fun of forcing Windows to assign a non-A/B drive letter to a floppy.

[ssokolow]

Diskettes = 3.5 inch the thing most people still got to know, but it no longer was floppy, rather stiff

Technically, the relevant floppiness is unchanged, because the name refers to the recording platter, not the protective shell.

Also, you might enjoy the 8-bit Guy's 108 Rare and Bizarre Media Types. I'm too young to remember anything older than 5.25" floppies but I certainly enjoyed it.

[f0rmat]

Happy to see there still is contribution to the media I grew up with!
Well, that's not entirely correct.
Floppies = 8 inch floppies, actually a floppy disc (before my time)
Mini-Floppy = 5.25 inch (my 486 already did not have a drive for those, so I later got one)
Diskettes = 3.5 inch the thing most people still got to know, but it no longer was floppy, rather stiff
(later variants with 2.88 MB capacity, ZIP-drives and whatnot)

I wonder if somebody still has (or even uses!) a punched card reader, I don't know the correct Eglish term, you know, the paper with holes. I actually saw some of these papers in use (cards or long stripes of thin paper) here. Well, and some sorts of cartrdiges (I guess they had some kind of ROM in it) and datasettes, or the bigger tape rolls. And I really still love the boot process sounds of an old box. The churning of HDDs, the floppy seek sounds, the beefy beep from the speaker (not just some buzzer onboard) and all that stuff. Makes me remember the times when computer-land was a great discovery and I had much more time to dive into this fantastic foreign world!

YOU ARE OLD! Yes, I remember punch cards (that is the correct term). I also remember what happens when you knock a bunch of them over and have to put them back in the next order. Punch cards where the reason (for a long time) that you could not begin your code until column 8 on your screen (IIRC it was column 8). Column 1-7 were reserved for line numbers - as in GOTO 25.

I guess that makes me old, too.

[Blzut3]

-Windows 10 doesn't have any way to have old style of floppy drives, (I don't know of any system with IDE that could support Win10), but if you put any USB floppy drive, it'll also straight on get assigned letter A: and has its own icon. I don't have a second drive to check if it gets assigned B: , sadly

Not only USB floppy drives, LS-120 (and presumably LS-240) drives also work just fine on Windows 10 and will assume drive A and B. And these actually are IDE so you can get PCIe IDE controllers to connect them to the latest machines. The write head in these drives isn't particularly great at writing standard floppies that are readable in conventional drives so sometimes you need to zero out the disk on a conventional drive before writing.

Also plenty of machines that have an FDC and support Windows 10 just fine. The fastest being a toss up between the Nehalem/Westmere boards and the handful of Z68 and Z77 boards (Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge) that ASRock put an FDC on for reasons unknown. (AM3 boards also have them.) As the owner of one of the Z77 boards, I have a feeling a big reason the FDC disappeared at the moment it did was the transition to UEFI. The floppy drive only works when booting under CSM (which makes sense since the drive type is part of the BIOS), although I haven't tried hard enough to force the Linux floppy driver so it might be possible.

[Adarion]

Happy to see there still is contribution to the media I grew up with!
Well, that's not entirely correct.
Floppies = 8 inch floppies, actually a floppy disc (before my time)
Mini-Floppy = 5.25 inch (my 486 already did not have a drive for those, so I later got one)
Diskettes = 3.5 inch the thing most people still got to know, but it no longer was floppy, rather stiff
(later variants with 2.88 MB capacity, ZIP-drives and whatnot)

I wonder if somebody still has (or even uses!) a punched card reader, I don't know the correct Eglish term, you know, the paper with holes. I actually saw some of these papers in use (cards or long stripes of thin paper) here. Well, and some sorts of cartrdiges (I guess they had some kind of ROM in it) and datasettes, or the bigger tape rolls. And I really still love the boot process sounds of an old box. The churning of HDDs, the floppy seek sounds, the beefy beep from the speaker (not just some buzzer onboard) and all that stuff. Makes me remember the times when computer-land was a great discovery and I had much more time to dive into this fantastic foreign world!

[ssokolow]

I feel frustrated when applications like LibreOffice decide to stop using a floppy disk to save documents. It doesn't matter if the tech is obsolete! Everyone understands the symbol even if they don't know what a floppy is. Many young people probably do know what a floppy is because so many people post things about how funny it is that young people wouldn't know a thing like that, and young people read a lot of online content! An up or down arrow though? How do you know which is open vs save without waiting for a tool tip? :-(

Your LibreOffice is probably just using the GNOME integration. GNOME has a history of cargo cult copying Apple design decisions without understanding them well enough to do it properly. KDE is still using floppy disk icons because they've become "the save glyph" and consistency is more important once everyone knows the meanings.

[AndyChow]

You can watch Shrek on a floppy. https://gizmodo.com/punish-yourself-...que-1845961375

[zzarko]

As I have retro computers (not x86 based!) that use floppy disks, I'm glad that the driver is still there to transfer floppy images for them. Some of them can be written using USB floppy drives, but for most of them only an internal floppy will do, and for some of them only external solutions work. Regarding Commodore 1541, ZoomFloppy is a great thing to connect them to USB and transfer files...

[fallingcats]

I feel frustrated when applications like LibreOffice decide to stop using a floppy disk to save documents. It doesn't matter if the tech is obsolete! Everyone understands the symbol even if they don't know what a floppy is. Many young people probably do know what a floppy is because so many people post things about how funny it is that young people wouldn't know a thing like that, and young people read a lot of online content! An up or down arrow though? How do you know which is open vs save without waiting for a tool tip? :-(

I don't know which icons you're using but LibreOffice on plasma desktop (breeze icons per default) still has the floppy symbol in the newest version on arch.