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> From: James Broadhead [mailto:jamesbroadhead@×××××.com] |
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> Sent: Monday, January 30, 2012 8:15 AM |
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> On 30 January 2012 13:09, Michael Hampicke <gentoo-user@××××.biz> wrote: |
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> >> Technically, they did, it was just impossible for an OS to make it |
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> >> actually work: |
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> >> |
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> >> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/04/02/9528175.aspx |
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> Honestly, given that it's a single bit check per hardware change, it |
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> doesn't seem like all that challenging of a feature. We could have had |
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> autorun.inf viruses almost 5 years earlier! |
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The problem, IIRC, is that the floppy bus has no way of identifying a "hardware change" even happened, so there would be nothing to trigger the hardware re-check. |
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Of course you could "make it work" with all kinds of heuristics but most of them involve getting the auto-insert check wrong at least once. That means either spinning up the drive when it's empty ("Dear /.: Windows is stupid! It keeps trying to read from my floppy drive when there's no disk."), or failing to spin up when a disk is inserted and requiring user intervention ("Dear /.: Windows is stupid! It used to know when I put a disk in my floppy and now it stopped!"). |
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By the time Windows 95 came along floppies were on the way out and really not worth the hassle. Windows auto-mounts all drives on demand, so it didn't really need to know when you put a disk in, and none of the software that came on floppies had autorun setup. I'm kinda surprised they even spent as much time as they did looking at it :) |
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