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On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 5:08 PM, walt <w41ter@×××××.com> wrote: |
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> On 01/29/2012 12:04 PM, Dale wrote: |
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>> Mark Knecht wrote: |
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> |
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>>> A single USB thumb drive for $20 would likely hold every floppy he |
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>>> ever made, and maybe 10-20 times more. Why waste time making & sorting |
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>>> through CDs, etc? |
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> |
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>> Hmmmm, super point. May suggest that. I got to boot something to see |
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>> what this rig has in it. It may be a older system. I'm pretty sure I |
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>> saw USB tho. |
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>> |
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>> I bet USB has a better life span than floppies too. |
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> |
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> Boy that's the truth. All of my three (working) old machines still have |
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> floppy drives, but my next one won't. |
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Yeah, I haven't had a box with a floppy drive in quite some time. |
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> And good riddance, too. Last |
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> time I made a floppy boot disk (years ago) I had to format about a dozen |
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> floppies before I found a good one :p |
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FWIW, you could probably have fixed them by using superformat to do a |
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low-level format. And you coulda made yourself some disks capable of |
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holding a whopping *two megabytes!* |
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> |
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> BTW, the floppy drives I have don't send any interrupt when I insert a |
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> disk, so automounting is a non starter. Maybe the newer USB external |
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> floppy drives do, dunno, but I'm not tempted to try one. |
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Possibly. Thing is, the spec for floppies which plugged into PC clones |
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didn't really allow for any kind of notification. It just plugged into |
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an MFM controller, which swept the read/write head around to the |
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commands of the host machine. I do know that the USB drives make |
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assumptions about floppy sector/track layouts, which I found to be a |
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bit of a bummer. |
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-- |
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:wq |
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