Windows 95 Almost Autodetected Floppy Disks 334
bonch writes "Windows 95 almost shipped with a technique for detecting whether a floppy disk was inserted without spinning up the drive. Microsoft's floppy driver developer discovered a sequence of commands that detected a disk without spinup — unfortunately, unspecified behavior in the floppy hardware specification meant that half the drives worked one way and half the other, each giving opposite results for the detection routine. Microsoft considered a dialog prompting the user to insert a disk to 'train' the routine, but the idea was scrapped."
Um (Score:5, Insightful)
Amiga the alternate music (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn9VkoOO3EA [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Um (Score:4, Informative)
The follow-up article explains. [msdn.com]
Re:Um (Score:4, Informative)
Problem: floppy drives were not plug-and-play, so the computer could not tell when one was swapped for another. In fact, I think Windows only gets information about whether there is or is not a floppy drive (but no more information) from the BIOS. Anyway, suppose you have a (let's call it) "Type A" drive on which Windows was trained and then replaced it with a "Type B" one that reported disk status differently. Now all of a sudden Windows thinks you have a disk in when you don't and thinks you don't when you do. The user will then complain about how Windows is broken and can't recognize that a floppy disk is inserted.
About the only thing this would have been useful for is "autorun" like what they did with CDs. But given the prevalance of floppy-transmitted viruses in this day, this probably ended up being a good thing!
Re:Um (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
One arguement against that would be that it takes the user out of their context; they stick a floppy in to do something with it and Windows pops up to get them to do something? Perhaps it seemed unfriendly.
They could have had more of that Mac-like experience though. It's a shame.
Re:Um (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is you don't have to do even that. The routine would look something like:
- User initiates action with the floppy drive
- Run the auto-detection routine to see what answer you get
- Spin up the drive and check to see if something is in the drive
- Compare that with the pre-spun result to see what answer you get.
Something along those lines. There are several variations on this that would work and never require you to interact with the user at all.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Bingo. There must have been some other reason they didn't include this feature, as that solution is obvious and simple.
Re:Um (Score:5, Funny)
And thus, didn't occur to the Microsoft engineer...
Re:Um (Score:5, Informative)
On the contrary... from the follow-up article: [msdn.com]
On the almost-feature of floppy insertion detection in Windows 95
Gosh, that floppy insertion article generated a lot of comments.
First, to clarify the table: The table is trying to say that if you had a Style A floppy drive, then issuing the magic series of commands would return 1 if a floppy was present, or 0 if the floppy was not present. On the other hand, if you had a Style B floppy drive, then issuing the magic series of commands would return 0 if a floppy was present, or 1 if the floppy was not present. That's what I was trying to say in the table. The answer was consistent within a floppy style, but you first had to know what style you had.
The downside of waiting until the user uses a floppy for the first time is that you have the it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't problem. Dad buys a new computer and a copy of the Happy Fun Ball game for his son. Dad turns on the computer, and then follows the instructions that come with the Happy Fun Ball package: "Just insert the floppy and follow the instructions on the screen." Dad inserts the floppy and... nothing happens because this is the first time Dad used the floppy, and he was expecting autodetection to work.
Dad says, "Stupid program doesn't work."
Dad complains to his co-workers at work. "He loves this game Happy Fun Ball when he visits his cousin's house, so I bought a computer and a copy of Happy Fun Ball, and it doesn't work!"
Dad tries again that evening and this time it works, because in the meantime, he inserted a floppy to do something else (say, create an emergency boot disk). Bizarre. This just reinforces Dad's impression that computers are unpredictable and he will never understand how to use them.
One could say that a feature that mysteriously turns itself on and off is worse than a feature that simply doesn't work. At least when it doesn't work, it predictably doesn't work. Human beings value predictability.
You can't perform the test "the first time the drive is installed" because there is no way to tell that a drive has been installed. (Classic floppy drives are not Plug-and-Play.) Even worse, you can't tell that the user has replaced the Style A floppy drive with a Style B floppy drive. The user will see that floppy insertion detection stopped working and return the drive to the store. "This drive is broken. Floppy insertion detection doesn't work."
It is also not the case that the ambiguity in the specification indicated a flaw in the specification. The C++ language specification, for example, leaves a lot of behaviors at the discretion of the implementation. This allows implementations to choose a behavior that works best for them. The no-spin-up floppy presence detection algorithm relied on several behaviors which were covered by the specification, and one that was not. It was not part of the original charter for the floppy specification committee to support spinless presence detection; it's just something that my colleague discovered over a decade after the specification was written.
But the main reason for not bothering is that the benefit was minuscule compared to the cost. Nobody wants floppy drives to spin up as soon as a disk is inserted. That just makes them think they've been attacked by a computer virus. It'd all just be a lot of work for a feature nobody wants. And then you'd all be posting, "I can't believe Microsoft wasted all this effort on floppy insertion detection when they should have fixed insert favorite bug here."
Re:Um (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? I liked how I could insert a floppy into my Mac, there was a firm ka-thunk that the disk was inserted, and then like magic, the floppy icon appeared on my desktop to indicate that the computer was ready for you to use it (or it would pop up a 'could not recognize this disk').
Do this day, on windows (at least up to xp), clicking the floppy icon (which is always present) freezes the window while it goes about trying to read from the drive, making it annoying if you accidentally click the icon (because it's always there).
And the system possibly could have worked by doing the test the first time the floppy is attempted to be accessed after the system boots... But you did save less than a dollar (retail) on the drive.
Re:Um (Score:5, Informative)
You're a bit out of focus here. It worked well on the Mac and the Amiga because the floppy drives themselves were different. The hardware was designed to signal the machine when a disk was inserted via a switch/sensor inside the drive that was depressed when the disk was inserted. Similar, but in a different location than the "write protect" and "high density" sensors. This method is simple and it works. The only real point of failure is the possibility of the switch going bad, but I can't say that I've ever seen that personally.
The method from Microsoft was a way to do the same thing in a way that wouldn't always work. Do you remember Floppy Drives? Remember how cheap and shitty they were? They were not very reliable to begin with, and it's likely that even if it worked before there might still be mysterious times when a disk was inserted and this method wouldn't work. Microsoft made a good choice here, but rather than acknowledge that you'll just bitch more and fish more crap from the excuse box.
Re:Um (Score:4, Informative)
The floppy icon is there by default because the BIOS tells Windows it is installed and Windows has no way of checking wether this is true.
The way to remove this icon is by going into your BIOS and telling it there is no floppy drive installed. (it' the option with the 3.5" 1.44M floppy)
Re:Um (Score:5, Interesting)
That whole explanation is bullshit. AutoRun was not reliable at first for CDs either, and most software included instructions for what to do if the AutoRun screen didn't show up or if AutoRun was disabled.
Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
One could say that a feature that mysteriously turns itself on and off is worse than a feature that simply doesn't work. At least when it doesn't work, it predictably doesn't work. Human beings value predictability.
Consistency in an operating is indeed a high priority, but the designers at Microsoft think they know better and suggest [microsoft.com] "Because Windows adapts to how you use your computer, the menu items you use most will be automatically displayed in the future. So the next time you open the menu, you might not need to expand it."
Nobody wants floppy drives to spin up as soon as a disk is inserted. That just makes them think they've been attacked by a computer virus. It'd all just be a lot of work for a feature nobody wants.
If only they had remembered this lesson. Some years later they considered it vastly different to spin up a CD upon insertion. Then they figured they'd not only do that, but also trust the media enough to blindly start executing code from it.
Re:Um (Score:4, Insightful)
For that matter, they could have done it during setup or any other time. It doesn't matter if a floppy's in the drive or not. Check if there is one the old fashioned way (spinning the motor) and then do your routine. Bam, trained, and you never have to spin the drive again for this purpose.
Re:Um (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way the OS even knew your floppy drive existed was through the bios. If you told the BIOS you had a floppy drive and you didn't, the OS would be none the wiser. And if the OS didn't know if there really was a drive or not, I somehow doubt the technology could even support unique device ID's like modern stuff.
In other words, your plan would work if floppy drives had device ids, but they dont, so your idea won't work either!
Re:Um (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed you can. Little known to most, the floppy drive was hot-swap :-)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you spin up the drive and find there isn't a disk there, that either means there isn't a disk there, or the disk is faulty.
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Re:Um (Score:5, Funny)
If you'd ever used Windows before, you'd know that the consequences of interrupting the user with stupid dialog boxes is not something its UI designers worry (worried?) much about...
*ahem*
It looks like you've inserted a floppy disc! Would you like any help with that?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wow, if only you'd realised that it wasn't the operating system's fault, but the filesystem's, and started to write your own, databased, journaled filsystem. How things could've been different...
Oh, or just disable auto-run. You can keep autodetection, but still have autorun disabled. Tweakui (of powertoys) is how I do it.
Re: (Score:2)
Assuming that you actually meant "behind the scenes the first time a floppy is accessed" and never do it aagain...
The article's author (Raymond Chen) addressed that in his follow-up article [msdn.com], posted yesterday.
Re:Um (Score:5, Insightful)
problem: some users are idiots
solution: treat all users like idiots
I know its not the msway but a would regkey you could manually set have been that hard?
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isn't that some of what makes Windows so exciting? autorun on media insert...
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It was a shame too, since floppy drives were prolific long after Windows 95
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Actually there were viruses that did this in DOS (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a DOS virus once and it did this so that any disk in the drive while the virus was in memory would become immediately infected.
So viruses were doing this years before Windows 95.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, otherwise I wouldn't be mentioning it here :). In fact I discovered the virus because the 5.25" drive light would come on when a disk was inserted before the drive was even closed.
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It tells you that next time you can detect it that way before spin up.
Duh.
Floppy? (Score:5, Funny)
What's a Floppy?
Re: (Score:2)
It's that thing hanging between your legs.
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That's what she said!
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Story of my life. Sigh.
Detection via delta? (Score:3, Interesting)
Couldn't you perform the detection by measuring the delta of the state?
On booting Windows 95, attempt to read from the floppy drive. If there's no disk, then take whatever that hardware state is - whether 1 or 0 - as the 'base' value, and periodically check to see if that value has changed.
I may be missing something but it seems like the appropriate trigger isn't the specific value of the flag, but rather the setting of said flag.
--Ryvar
Re:Detection via delta? (Score:5, Funny)
Reading would require a spin-up.
The article only says that the non spin up method was an extremely clever chain of commands so..
We are sitting here talking about MS tech for no apparent reason with no apparent hope of arriving at any sort of conclusion...
Why am I here again?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because some of us elder geeks like learning about clever and functional hardware tricks, I suppose. It's always interesting to me when a piece of hardware learns a new trick which its designers never intended, with software alone. Using the PC speaker for digital audio is one. Data acquisition with a parallel port is another.
Central Point's PC Tools Backup program used to do floppy detection, but it kept the motor spinning the whole time. So, doing this same trick without spinning the motor is interest
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Yes, and that's been a danger since day one. The removable media should _never_ have been the default: it should have been the fallthrough boot medium, to keep idiots from booting with floppies or later CD's and USB devices automatically to take control of your hardware.
Re: (Score:2)
You can't fallthrough if there is a HDD with no OS is installed, the default setting allows you to install an OS on 1st run, which is normally what you need to do! Later you should change that setting when you no longer need to install the OS.
Re:Detection via delta? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and that's been a danger since day one. The removable media should _never_ have been the default: it should have been the fallthrough boot medium, to keep idiots from booting with floppies or later CD's and USB devices automatically to take control of your hardware.
On "day one" the *ONLY* option was "removable media". If you were lucky, you might even have had drive A: _and_ drive B:.
Where did I put that SlowNewsDay tag? (Score:2)
???
How about veryslownewsday? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Where did I put that SlowNewsDay tag? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hopefully far away.
To ordinary people, this is indeed a non-story. But to a true nerd, a story about an undocumented feature in a (once) popular tech almost being implemented in a (once) popular OS is interesting reading.
It may not be "news for nerds, stuff that matters" but it's definitely "stuff for nerds".
Obligatory Linux Comment (Score:3, Interesting)
Just out of curiosity, what mechanism does Linux use to do this? In Ubuntu both on my laptop and desktop it magically detects floppies when they're inserted seemingly without spinning the drive. My laptop uses an external USB drive, but my desktop has a bog standard internal drive circa 1992.
But on a different note, if you want Windows to autodetect floppies for you... Buy an LS-120 drive.
Re:Obligatory Linux Comment (Score:4, Informative)
The same one that Apple did 20 years ago. The same one that Microsoft bagged 15+ years ago. The some one discussed in the article.
If you're asking how it does it without "training", then you could read some of the other posts for solutions. Easiest being when the user clicks on the drive and there's a floppy in there, remember which flag meant a disc is there and do it from then on. Not perfect at first, but for the rest of the time (assuming no hardware change) it will be. If there's a hardware change, then remember that flag instead.
Legacy code... (Score:3, Funny)
i always forgot if my duke nukem floppy was in... (Score:2, Funny)
You also have issue of replacing floppy (Score:2)
And you find your new drive doesn't work... because it's the opposite.
Hmmm.
However, you could record the state of last insert
And then when the use attempts to read the disk, if you read it successfully, then have it.
And it would have been self healing.
So then the only issue would be two different drives in the same system (we used to have them you know-- to copy floppies easily) which had different types of insert.
How often would THAT happen? (Score:2)
Really..?
IMHE - floppy drives are on of those things you could salvage even from a case that was partially burned or submerged in water.
Only things in the case that are more robust and/or reusable are cables, case itself and the screws.
Macs (Score:3, Interesting)
I never imagined that MS developers were smart enough to actually to think of something like this. We in Macintosh land where auto-detection of floppies was standard from the beginning had simply chalked it up to a simple case of microsoft being microsoft.
Re:Macs (Score:5, Interesting)
You had something resembling a hardware spec, you lucky beggars. One thing that has slowed Linux development has been the plethora of weird hardware specs that Microsoft and their partners designed and supported, and people in Linux-land are expected to have "just work" despite this kind of specification insanity. In fact, when I can, I prefer to buy hardware that is listed as "Macintosh compatible" because the specs are so much more reliable and the quality is generally higher.
Re:Macs (Score:4, Informative)
You can do a lot of stuff when you control the hardware as well as the software. Apple just installed the correct drive in all their machines in the first place.
It has nothing to do with Microsoft "being stupid", it has to do with Microsoft having to run on shit hardware.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Macs (Score:5, Interesting)
Floppys were the worst too. There was like no standard way to put in the ribbon cable so that Pin-1 on the cable hit Pin-1 on the drive. Some of the ribbons had a filled hole to act as a key--some of the disks had a pin there so that cable didn't work. Some of the disks were designed for the key'd ribbon, but all you had on hand were non-keyed cabling. Some of them had a plastic key on the ribbon so they wouldn't work on the drive missing the slot for the key.
None of the disks had a plastic mold that surrounded the pins. That lead to you connecting the ribbon so the pins were all off by a row. Then when you pulled out the ribbon, it was very easy to bend all the pins.
Keep in mind you were usually doing all this while the disk was screwed into the case and tucked into some god-awful location too. So you'd be inserting this ribbon essentially blind. As a result, every drive I owned had pins that were bent to shit because it would take like 4 try's to get the damn thing working. And worse, you'd never know if you didn't hook it up right until you booted the box and tried to read from the drive.
Oh and if you did manage to get them working, the media was so unreliable that sometimes you could take a brand new disk, write to it, carry it to class and find all your data corrupt. Woe is the fool who didn't write the same file to two disks, lest he arrive with nothing but a bad disk.
Floppy disks sucked. There was nothing good about them. Slow, unreliable and ill designed. Fuck them and the free AOL disks they wrote on.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a very well adhered to de-facto standard which applied to floppy drives, the early MFM/RLL ST501 style hard drives and even the later IDE drives:
Pin one (red stripe on ribbon cable) is always closest to the power connector.
Very rarely did anything not adhere to that.
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Macs were ten times worse - no eject button on the drive. IIRC the way to get your floppy was to drag the floppy disk icon to the trashcan.
Totally intuitive gesture, that one. I guess this is the "easy to use" interface that Mac fans are always sighing over.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You recall incorrectly. There was a menu command called "eject disk" which did exactly what it was supposed to.
Dragging the disk to the trash was a way to un-mount the volume, which (for floppy disks) also resulted in their being ejected.
Having an eject button on the drive would make them like modern CD/DVD drives (which auto-detect and mount discs like TFA is discussing) where pushing the Eject button doesn't always eject the disc, since it may be in use.
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Oh it got better than that. On the very old macs which booted off a floppy - if that floppy was corrupted and the machine crashed you'd have to go find a paperclip to get the damn thing out because resetting the machine was a waste of time - it would just attempt to boot of the disk and crash again. Yeah , well thought out that one Apple.
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I know on newer Macs you can just hold down the mouse button (or left mouse button if you're using a multi-button mouse) at boot to eject CDs and DVDs. Was this not the case for floppies?
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This was the case for Macs since ATLEAST the Mac Plus. I remember having to do this. You could, infact, delay boot by holding down the mouse button, because the computer was trying to eject a disk that wasn't in the drive.
Re:Macs (Score:5, Interesting)
Yah.
You have to remember, a lot of people on Slashdot posting about Classic MacOS never actually used it. Most of them only adopted Macs after OS X came out, but they like to pretend they were part of the "Classic Club" by giving us little gems like the post you replied to.
If you even slightly think something said on Slashdot might be wrong, go with your gut.
twenty year ejection (Score:5, Interesting)
That says a lot about the attitude toward Apple when the major point of criticism is over style points.
I had the original fat Mac (512KB) with two floppy drives. There was no internal hard drive and not really anywhere to put it. IIRC, I priced a 10MB hard drive in the range of $1500 with the necessary case mods. Whatever the price, it was a sizable fraction of the purchase of a new-fangled IBM AT. (If you don't know what fangled means, assume the worst.)
The dual floppy fat Mac was pretty much a write-off for coding in C. My Unix-like C environment required at least three active floppy drives to get anything accomplished.
Fortunately, Apple had implemented an auto-eject whenever the unmounted floppy was required. Invariably, it chose to eject the disk you would immediately need next. I muttered so many times to myself "no, you stupid POS, suck that diskette back in and eject the *other* one". Apple provided no convenient way to override this mistake. I had a lot of bent paper clips on my desk.
Apple's philosophy then, which has ever-so-slowly evolved over two decades was "if this bothers you that much, spend half the price of a new machine on a short-sighted upgrade to an internal 10MB hard drive, which was never built to accommodate this". (You still won't have a proper LAN.) Or better yet, buy the Lisa.
I would have loved to drag Apple's entire floppy disk interface into the trash can.
Another thing about Apple back in the day was the rumour that Mac OS would support true virtual memory "real soon now" once hard drives became a standard feature. Apparently they were too busy crowing about the lack of 8.3 to pull this off. It didn't come true until the first release of OS X. Thus the nearly twenty year gap between my first Mac purchase and my second one.
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I never imagined that MS developers were smart enough to actually to think of something like this. We in Macintosh land where auto-detection of floppies was standard from the beginning had simply chalked it up to a simple case of microsoft being microsoft
Such small things as having your hardware custom built, instead of dealing with gazillion different models and manufacturers, have probably made implementation of such a feature far simpler.
Oh... and that electronic floppy ejection system, which was controlled by the OS, might have had a part in that too.
This was a non-feature to begin with... (Score:2)
Read the original link. In the end, they figured out that users were not trained to expect a floppy to spin immediately upon insertion, and would suspect they unleashed a virus or something even nastier.
Their decision was a good one, for once.
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No, re-read it yourself. They're were not talking about auto-run, they were talking about detecting the disk in the drive without reading from it:
... if you issued just the right extremely clever sequence of commands, you could determine whether a disk was in the floppy drive without spinning up the drive.
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But if you read the follow-up, [msdn.com] they talk about having a game autorun as a feature they planned to implement.
The "no-spinning-up" was probably just to avoid your machine go "Bzzt" every two seconds.
Suspicion? What about other less suspicious ideas? (Score:2)
Many anti-virus software spun up the floopy drive when Windows 95 was starting up, and when it was shutting down. The way I see it, Windows 95 could do a read with or without the floppy at start up. If an error is returned, it would indicate whether there is a disk or not or if that's a different kind of error. Compare the result with the algorithm that detects presence of a disk without spinning up. Just need to do this once during boot time. Don't even bother caching the result in the registry since a use
Re:Suspicion? What about other less suspicious ide (Score:2)
I have my doubts... (Score:4, Informative)
One of the signficant problems with DOS and Windows 3 was what appeared to be a policy from Microsoft. They refused, for hardware compatibility reasons I am sure, to make use of DMA with floppy drives. Similarly, until Windows 95 there was no use of DMA except by third-party drivers at all.
The result of this was that any Microsoft backup utility ran at half (or less) the speed3 of any DMA-using backup utility. Also, if you didn't have a third-party DMA driver, hard disk access was considerably slower.
Windows 3.11 finally included what was apparently a licensed DMA driver for 32-bit hard disk access. It did not appear to have too many compatibility problems, but there were some. If anything, I would see this as reinforcing the idea of continuing to use BIOS access for the floppy drive and BIOS access only.
There was some relaxation of this with Windows 95, but by no means was it complete. DMA continued to be under-utilized for I/O, partly because of kernel design and partly because of hardware compatibility issues. With more rigorous standards from Microsoft about how stuff is required to work, somewhere around 1999 we started getting more "standardized" hardware for the Windows world.
Anyone comparing this to Apple doesn't understand the problem. With Apple there was one hardware standard and only one, since 1984.
And this is relevant because...? (Score:2)
It's not like it's 1995 anymore....
I know the feeling. (Score:5, Funny)
I question this. (Score:3, Informative)
5.25" floppy drives had two optical switches, one on either side of the disk. One detected the presence of the disk, the other was for the write-protect tab.
Similarly, 3.5" disks had three switches. One detected the cutout that represented disk capacity (720K or 1.44M), one was for presence of the disk, the other for write-protection.
The drives reported the status of these switches when queried by software.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If the hardware switches did indeed report differently depending on the model, then yes I can see this. But the article makes it sound like the programmer was some kind of clever genius; rather, the insertion detection was right there in the specification to begin with.
Follow-up Article (Score:2)
The article's author, Raymond Chen, posted a follow-up article [msdn.com] to the one linked in the summary that answers some of the questions people had about it. Why that didn't make it into the summary, I don't know.
Re: (Score:2)
The followup article didn't exist yet when I submitted the story on Thursday.
ok, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why didn't they spin up the drive to check for a disk, run the routine that doesn't spin the drive up and based on the results, adapt the result to the computer...
This is great news! (Score:2)
I got a first post. Why didn't anyone tell me?
Fond memories (Score:2)
I vaguely remember back then with at least the first release of Windows 95 where if you used a floppy to read or save a file, then you were cursed by having the floppy drive accessed a couple of times every time you would go to open or save a file from either a particular application or however else the "Recently used" file information was shared. It was actually worse if you had a floppy in the drive, because it would then read the contents as well.
Also new in Win95 was that you could read/write to a flop
For of all sad words of tongue or pen.. (Score:2)
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
- John Greenleaf Whittier
More sad are these we daily see:
"It is, but hadn't ought to be."
- Bret Harte
It's not tooo late (Score:2, Funny)
Big deal (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not surprised. For all computer platforms that used floppy disks, the MS-DOS world seemingly got the shaft. Amigas and Macs had utilities that could read MS-DOS disks and such, but with the way MS-DOS did disks(correct me if I'm wrong), they couldn't read any other format. Putting long filename support aside, eh, it just wasn't that great. A hardware-level detection if a floppy disk is inserted would have been welcome. Autorun? No(but that's software).
Click (Score:3, Insightful)
AmigaOS 1.0 did that
Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
Another Windows 95 amazing autodetection (Score:2)
Good Feature (Score:2)
Still was unable to use a floppy and multitask... (Score:3, Interesting)
Diskette change line... (Score:3, Informative)
Ever since the first IBM PCs, there was a specific data line in the ribbon cable dedicated for disc-change sense.
The real problem was that IBM never specified in the spec what voltage level it should be for when there is a disc in the drive and when it is out.
IBM PC-DOS (which had IBM's own IBMBIO.SYS instead of Microsoft's one) behaved differently on the original IBM I had years ago. When there was no diskette in the drive, attempts to use it immediately failed. However, it could not detect if I had not closed the gate so if the diskette was in but the gate open, the drive motor would spin but the floppy couldn't spin. If you ever look at the insides of those old 5.25" full height floppy drives, you'd notice that there are 2 opto-switches: One to detect the write-protect tab, the other was deep in the drive to detect if a floppy was pushed all the way in.
I recall that most 3.5" drives have two microswitches inside them right next to each other - one for the write-protect and the other simply to detect disk presence. Some of them won't even bother spinning the drive motor if unless that switch was depressed.
selling point for win7 (Score:4, Funny)
...but they've worked it out and plan to release it in Windows7 as a key selling point. I'm pumped, this will make installing kings quest 1-4 much easier.
Re: (Score:2)
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And the Amiga...
Re:Is it just me? (Score:5, Informative)
But Apple computers required you to unmount your floppies before you could get them back. Or if your computer crashed, you had to get it out with a paperclip.
Re: (Score:2)
IIRC, there was a beta of Windows 95 that did periodically turn on the floppy drive light.
If you had a better quality floppy drive, it was almost silent, but the cheaper models did go BZZT-CLANK-BZT every minute or so.
Re:Non-system disk or disk error anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations on not reading the article or summary.
First, this feature was talking about checking if a disk is present without spinning up the disk. To boot from a floppy, a computer spins up the disk and looks for a boot sector.
Second, that would be the BIOS, not Windows, checking the floppy during the boot process. It checks the devices in the order it's set to. Back in the mid 90s, this was generally floppy, then IDE, then SCSI. A few people with good hardware had CD-ROM in there, too.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That's unfair! Sometimes it succeeded at staying up for ohhhh... whole minutes at a time, sometimes consecutive minutes even. On a really good day, you even needed the shutdown feature.