Windows 95 Almost Autodetected Floppy Disks

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."

Comments

Um

[linumax]

Why not do the behavior detection on first instance a floppy disk was used?

Re:Um

[Threni]

If you can detect a floppy is inserted you can do stuff with it straight away. If you have to wait for it to be used, then...well, what are you doing? You're saying "we're using a floppy disk so there must be a floppy disk in the drive". What does that tell you?

Re:Um

[joeware]

I think you misunderstood linumax's comment. He is saying that instead of prompting the user to insert a floppy to train it, just automatically do the training behind the scenes the first time a floppy is inserted.

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[v1]

isn't that some of what makes Windows so exciting? autorun on media insert...

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[Nursie]

It tells you that next time you can detect it that way before spin up.

Duh.

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[interstellar_donkey]

It was a shame too, since floppy drives were prolific long after Windows 95

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[lseltzer]

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

[enjo13]

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.

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[VGPowerlord]

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, posted yesterday.

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[localman]

Bingo. There must have been some other reason they didn't include this feature, as that solution is obvious and simple.

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[Curtman]

Yeah, exciting is right. Give the malware a chance to infect the machine without any user interaction at all beyond inserting a disc. Sometimes I install Windows and actually use it for a while just so I don't miss out on all the excitement.

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[jonbryce]

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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[davester666]

And thus, didn't occur to the Microsoft engineer...

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[RiotingPacifist]

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?

Re:Um

[moderatorrater]

That was the most common comment on the blog post. His answer makes sense, basically saying that it would be confusing for the user that it not work the first time they put the disk in the drive but it would every time thereafter. In addition, if the disk drive were switched out for another one of the opposite type, then the user would return it with the statement that it was broken. Overall, it would cause more confusion than the training option, which had already been discarded as too onerous.

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[glavenoid]

...Or the drive is faulty, or the drive controller is faulty, or the drive's driver software is faulty, etc...

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[chickens]

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:Um

[Achromatic1978]

LOL. My first thought was 'big deal, my Amiga did that more than five years before'. :)

Re:Um

[General Wesc]

The follow-up article explains.

Re:Um

[Asmor]

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.

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[gnapster]

Maybe nowadays, but this kind of thing is endemic to recent Windows versions; it was not as common in Windows 95.

Re:Um

[nacturation]

On the contrary... from the follow-up article:

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

[Simulant]

... it would be confusing for the user that it not work the first time.... but it would every time thereafter.

No... That never happens. Never. Ever. Really...

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[mccdyl001]

damn wish i had mod points. and a shift key for that matter... anyway, surely there was a way for the operating system to poll the system using these 'magic' system commands to check if a disk had been inserted. so poll the system, see what it says - either a 1 or a 0, then spin up the drive and see what it actually says. heck do it as part of the system install. take a snapshot of the floppy drive device name or something at the same time. if the device name changes re-run this technique, cause if you swap the floppy with another drive which reports the same device name it'll still report 0 or 1 for the same type of disk insertion scenario so you fine, and if the floppy device name is diff, then re-run this technique. anyway, as part of the system install you could have polled if the disk was there, taken the answer, then actually spun up the drive and checked and bingo, your training is done1 damn what i could do with a shift key right now....

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[davester666]

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."

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.

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[coryking]

I know its not the msway but a would regkey you could manually set have been that hard?

Yes, it would have. Then they'd have to support it for all eternity. Even Windows 7 would have to support this one cute hack (does Windows 7 even support floppy disks?)

People with no business fiddling with their computer would mess around with this setting and make their computer less stable. "Not Microsoft's Problem" you say? Try telling that to the person who did the fiddling! Won't fly!

In other words, adding this registry hack seems simple on the surface, but it ain't.

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[uglyduckling]

This article reminds me of the robot who could almost detect cheese.

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[644bd346996]

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.

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[Yaur]

So then you do it at boot time. It doesn't matter if there is a disk in the drive or not, since spinning up the drive will tell you how to interpret the magic sequence in either case.

Re:Um

[moderatorrater]

And then the user wonders why the hell their disk drive is spinning up when there's nothing in it and making all those funny noises, as mentioned in the link. The real point of his blog post...(wait for it)...the engineer was smart enough to figure out how to detect the disk in the first place, he was smart enough to figure all these workarounds out and they were all rejected for valid reasons.

What's funny is that nerds on both his blog and this site jumped all over the chance to show how, years later and with only a vague description, they're able to solve a problem that the original guy and all the microsoft engineers couldn't.

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not train it on the first boot? Run the detection routine first and save the result, then attempt to spin up the drive and see if it is present. It is possible you will run into a few cases where a disk is inserted after that first boot process is started though.

Re:Um

[coryking]

floppy device name is diff

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

[rbcd]

First time: "Just insert the floppy, click OK to continue and then follow the instructions on the screen."

Every other time: "Just insert the floppy and follow the instructions on the screen."

Re:Um

[shadowbearer]

  Yeah, like a "media inserted" hardware switch or something.

  SB

Re:Um

[shadowbearer]

  *grin*

  I don't know about anyone else, but I do appreciate having a dialog box that comes up - preferably a small, unobtrusive one - that lets me know that the media I just inserted has been recognized and is now mountable and readable...

  Otherwise, I have to go find out for myself.

  Of course, it's also nice to have that behavior user modifiable...

  Like... it is, in most modern operating systems?

SB

Re:Um

[Al Dimond]

Sure, but if you do it during setup what happens if you replace the floppy drive in your computer? Or move the hard drive to a different computer entirely. Some of that could be detected, but it would be a lot of work for, as the MS dude said, something with a pretty small potential benefit.

Anyway, autorun sucks. So does media detection generally. We all know this. Especially all of us that run HAL on Linux but use programs that aren't aware of it. I thought my CD drive was broken for months before I figured out that HAL was just polling it while it was trying to play/burn CDs. When my girlfriend plugs her iPhone into her MacBook to charge it (I guess she doesn't have another charger) iPhoto opens right over the top of whatever else she's doing. How lame is that?

Re:Um

[Tacvek]

Why would people wonder about the drive spinning up with nothing in it each boot? The BIOS spun up the drive every time you started the computer to check for a boot disk. It was just a characteristic part of the boot sequence. There is little reason Windows could not have done the same. It be no more confusing than the other boot time actions of the computer. (Such as the probes of the parallel ports that made printers make strange noises, etc.).

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

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').

Apple controlled 100% of the hardware and could guarantee that behavior.

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[jgrahn]

LOL. My first thought was 'big deal, my Amiga did that more than five years before'. :)

The Amiga had more capable floppy drive hardware though.

Re:Um

[joetee]

And the Amiga1000 detected diskchange in 1985 - a decade earlier!

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[R.Mo_Robert]

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

[Jamie's Nightmare]

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.

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[MooUK]

How about startup, then?

Re:Um

[shaitand]

'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.'

Yeah, because that sure stopped them from using auto-detection on CD's... oh wait...

'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.'

The whole point of the routine is that it detects the disk WITHOUT spinning up the drive.

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[Plaid Phantom]

They could have made it part of the startup routine: on boot, run the test and store the result for as long as the computer is powered on.

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[omkhar]

floppy device name is diff

The only way the OS even knew your floppy drive existed was through the bios.

If you stayed in real mode

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

floppy device name is diff

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!

And it's still like this. Even in Vista. If you enable the Floppy in the BIOS, Vista will show a floppy. You can even plug a floppy into the Motherboard after boot and it will work

Re:Um

[v1]

all that accomplished was some of the most insane, noisy, LONG (sometimes downright musical) copy protection verifications in history.

Re:Um

[coryking]

You can even plug a floppy into the Motherboard after boot and it will work

Indeed you can. Little known to most, the floppy drive was hot-swap :-)

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[RiotingPacifist]

Then they'd have to support it for all eternity.

bullshit! If ms include an option, they are in no way required to support that option in the next version. This particular hack doesn't even affect the API or driver interfaces so in no way would removing support for it cause any problems.

People with no business fiddling with their computer

Funny last time i checked, if bob buys a computer, then bob can do whatever the fuck he wants with it. If he fancies it he can smash it to bits, its HIS computer not yours!

would mess around with this setting and make their computer less stable.

HOW, how can (not) autodetecting the presence of a floppy make your computer less stable???

"Not Microsoft's Problem" you say? Try telling that to the person who did the fiddling! Won't fly!

stick a suitible warning on it and it isn't Microsoft's Problem

CONFIG_STAGING_EXCLUDE_BUILD:

Are you sure you really want to build the staging drivers?
They taint your kernel, don't live up to the normal Linux
kernel quality standards, are a bit crufty around the edges,
and might go off and kick your dog when you aren't paying
attention.

This might void your warranty!
changing these advanced settings can be harmful to the stability, security and performance of this application. you should only continue if you are sure of what you are doing.

if you click through either of those you are well aware it is your fault if you mess-up!

In other words, including a feature you have already coded as an option, is easy, especially if at any time in the future can be removed. All side effects can be warned of in advance and as long as a setting is put at the correct reach only users who know what they are doing are going to find it. Treating all your users like idiots just because SOME are, pisses off many who aren't see pidgin/gnome

Re:Um

[x2A]

"If you stayed in real mode"

I don't think real mode had anything to do with it. The IO address space that the floppy controller lies on is 16 bit, it's a seperate address space to that of memory, so changes to the MMU mode (real/protected, segment/selector) make no difference, apart from specifying wither a default register operand to the IN/OUT instructions (where the operand is the data to be sent/received, not the address) would be 16 or 32 bit. The IO address was always 16 bit.

Re:Um

[x2A]

"Indeed you can. Little known to most, the floppy drive was hot-swap :-)"

As with PCI devices. I haven't tried this again with newer OSs, but with Win95, I was able to add/remove sound and network cards to a running system. Adding would require slotting in the card, then clicking the 'scan for new devices' in the device manager. Removing required disabling/uninstalling the driver in device manager, and then it could be removed. Probably not something to recommend people try if you care about the system and what's running on it, but purely experimentally, it worked completely fine.

Re:Um

[x2A]

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:Um

[Rockoon]

Aside from all the other reasons given in reply to you...

Why invest time in a feature that only a small portion of users would ever even notice or care about, where even the lack of this feature isnt even a problem?

I suspect that you never even noticed that this feature wasnt there.

Re:Um

[tellthepeople]

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.

If there is a virus on the disk and there isn't auto-detect how would the drive know to spin up?

Re:Um

[oracle128]

Yeah, and now people disable it because they think it'll give them a virus, and everyone bitches about Microsoft wasting effort on AutoRun instead of fixing insert favorite bug here. Seems to me that CD AutoRun pretty much proves his assumption of what would happen of the feature was on floppy drives.

Re:Um

[tellthepeople]

Even Windows 7 would have to support this one cute hack (does Windows 7 even support floppy disks?)

Windows 7 does indeed support floppy disks. Of course the point is moot if you don't have a floppy drive.

Re:Um

[aliquis]

The amiga did it to, but try to use the drive every now and then I guess because it clicks quite often.

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[Sj0]

You're right, I hadn't thought about it, but all Windows would have to do is check to see if a disk is in the drive, and act accordingly.

There's only 4 possibilities:

Disk in drive, shows 0
Disk in drive, shows 1
No disk in drive, shows 0
No disk in drive, shows 1

So checking during installation means you never need the user to do anything.

Re:Um

[Sj0]

As opposed to the MSN network client that mysteriously shipped with every copy of windows for years and years?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the Gnome manifesto...

Disclaimer: I still prefer Gnome to KDE lately.

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[kbg]

No we bitch about how you can get infected by a virus/adware with AutoRun, not that AutoRun in it self is bad. If Windows was designed properly then you wouldn't get infected with a virus by automatic running of a program.

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[Anonymous Coward]

The CDs don't insert themselves. Therefore it's not automatic. But hey, it's Slashdot, screw logic let's just bash Microsoft!

Re:Um

[ultranova]

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.

So don't wait. Do it during the setup. Simply run the detection routine and then spin up the drive to see if there was a floppy there. Simple as that.

But I guess Computer Science III is beyond most people :^).

Re:Um

[Igarden2]

At this point in time, why does anybody care? Is this some kind of epiphany? I think not. So, we learned that auto detection is a good thing. Whoopie!

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[kitgerrits]

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

[Mattsson]

Yeah, and now people disable it because they think it'll give them a virus.

It was only Friday I last encountered a usb-stick infected with a virus that uses the autorun function.

Autorun is a function that should be off by default.

Seems to me that CD AutoRun pretty much proves his assumption of what would happen of the feature was on floppy drives.

Autodetect and autorun is two completely different things.
I want the OS to autodetect CD's, floppys, usb-sticks and any other media.
I don't want the OS to automatically run anything on any media it autodetects.

Re:Um

[oracle128]

Then why tell me? Tell it to the parent. He's the one with the +5 Interesting for calling the article bullshit because it's possible to implement an unreliable AutoRun feature.

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[Haeleth]

I know its not the msway but a would regkey you could manually set have been that hard?

It would have taken time and resources. Which other feature would you like them to have dropped so they could implement a regkey that maybe a few thousand people worldwide would ever even have known about, for a non-critical feature relating to hardware that was already on the verge of obsolescence?

Re:Um

[Haeleth]

Right, and then people would post comments to Slashdot saying "Why does Windows always check the floppy drive when it boots? It shouldn't do anything like that unless I tell it to. Linux boots faster because it doesn't do pointless tests like this. This is why Windows sucks."

This was not a crucial feature. It wasn't even an important feature. Why slow down everyone's boot time just to save a little time later on for the minority who occasionally tried to access a floppy drive when there wasn't a disk in it?

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[DarkOx]

Oh please a in those days most people either were savy enough to click a, "Setup Floppy Detection" icon in the control panel or would not have been installing an FDD on their own any way.

OEMs could have just shipped things preset for the type of drives they were using. Retail installs could have done the detect at the same time the installer is already having the user make their boot floppy.

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen quite a few floppy drive controllers go up in smoke when people tried that.

Re:Um

[koro666]

You are incredibly lucky you didn't fry anything.

Once you let the magic smoke escape, it's quite hard to put it back in!

Re:Um

[RobertM1968]

You're forgetting that Win95 was installed via floppy.

Thus, doing the autodetection configuration during the installation should have been an easy thing. The installer is already accessing the floppy, it could write the config information to disk (or save it in memory) and then configure the autodetect routine accordingly. No user intervention required, and totally transparent.

Since it is such a simple solution to do this, I'm assuming that the code never worked to begin with, or MS just figured out how to do it.

If it took me (and how many others here on /.) only a few seconds to figure out how to do this transparently - and simpler/easier than by using a user prompt to "train" it, I cant believe MS couldnt think of it. I thus believe there were either (a) other problems that prevented the code from being usable and/or (b) they actually didnt have this figured out pre-Win95 release.

...because the only other scenario would be that the Win95 Dev Team is truly clueless - after all, with the stack of floppies required to install Win95, there are plenty of auto-config times available where no user intervention or prompts would be required to figure out which method worked with the floppy drive. (and no, I am not saying they are that clueless - I'm saying that assuming they aren't, my previous explanations are the only ones that make sense to me as to why they did not incorporate such functionality).

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac-like experience: "please insert disk x. I neither know nor care that you've since reformatted it/overwritten the relevant data/fed it to a grue - I'm going to sit here waiting and refusing to do anything else until you insert the disk (or seek out the well-hidden reset button)."

Ah those were the days... frustrating days, but days none-the-less.

Re:Um

[kbg]

It's funny how you can get modded as troll just because you tell the truth. Everybody that has any understanding of security understands that Windows security was designed badly from the start.

1) Default user as administrator = Bad design
2) All or nothing security when running a program instead of layered = Bad design
3) Open ports by default = Bad design

I could go on and on...

Re:Um

[toddestan]

Considering that this feature of PC floppy drives seemingly was never or almost never used (I didn't know about it until reading the article), it wouldn't surprise me at all if a bunch of hardware manufacturers had omitted support for it entirely, thus you would also have to deal with a third type of drive that would never change the value reported back, and even a possible fourth type where the value could change but would have nothing to do with a disk being inserted. That is another likely reason for not adding this feature to Windows.

Re:Um

[shutdown -p now]

Floppy drives didn't have different drivers for different models.

Re:Um

[stewbacca]

And by "controlled" you mean Apple purchased cheap commodity hard drives from the same vendors as other PC manufacturers, but then ensured their OS drivers communicated flawlessly with the one hard drive they standardized on?

Re:Um

[idontgno]

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.

It does happen, in reeeeeally old hardware. My ca 1990 Amiga 3000 had its floppy drive "disk inserted" pinswitch fail (slowly, progressively, over the course of 3 years) a couple of years ago. Annoying symptoms: With a diskette inserted, the system would randomly think the someone had removed the diskette and then re-inserted it. That's kinda bad for disk format integrity if there's a write operation in progress.

I had to replace the drive (ebay ftw). I supposed I could try to fix the bad switch (since I kept the old drive), but I've never had luck refurbishing the small-scale electromechanicals you find in things like floppy drives. Those things don't need a "No User-Servicable Parts" label.

But I think the critical point is this: the technology for stuff like media detection was available, and a few "commodity" floppy drives even supported it. But not universally. Amiga, Mac, et al, could rely on those features because they were explicitly required and those systems never used commodity floppy drives. PCs, OTOH, never specified this behavior, so support for this was kinda up in the air with the huge variety of manufacturers, vendors, and models of commodity floppy drives. 1995 was waaaay too late to try to depend on that kind of behavior.

Re:Um

[bjb]

The Amiga clicked because it was detecting if a floppy had been inserted. It would cycle between seeking to track 1 and track 0, which would cause the small click and would reset a latch used for this detection. In later versions of the Amiga OS, they realized that if they cycled between track 0 and track -1, there was no click. However, this was a problem with some 3rd party drives because they didn't implement the right sensors to detect that you were stepping to the -1 track and would actually hurt the drive.

Either way, yes. The click was a way of making sure it knew if a disk was inserted or removed.

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

That still doesn't answer it. The nice things is this feature tells if there's a floppy without spinning the drive. Why not just spin the drive once after booting? Then you can set a flag. It's not like someone is going to replace the drive with the power on, then complain it doesn't work right.

Re:Um

[x2A]

Hence my "do not recommend for stuff you care about" disclaimer... but it definitely wasn't luck, it just worked, repeatibly, without problem.

Floppy?

[TheKidWho]

What's a Floppy?

Re:Floppy?

[Nimey]

It's that thing hanging between your legs.

Re:Floppy?

[Alwin Henseler]

A medium with capacity as much as 0.0000000000146 LOC - a significant advance over storage on audio tape!

Re:Floppy?

[TheKidWho]

That's what she said!

Re:Floppy?

[RichardJenkins]

Story of my life. Sigh.

Re:Floppy?

[hawk]

It's that thing that apple auto-detected.

And folks claimed that Win95 was Mac 88 . . . :)

hawk

Re:Floppy?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is babby formed?

Re:Floppy?

[drinkypoo]

And folks claimed that Win95 was Mac 88 . . . :)

It's so true: Apple achieved special things with floppy drives by using a variable-speed drive that cost more. It also had signalling different from a PC drive. PCs use commodity parts which do less but cost less. Of course, today Macs are just PC... Face it, the Apple way lost. (Apple lost its way...)

Re:Floppy?

[Haeleth]

Mac users claimed that, yeah. Never mind that Mac OS didn't even get basic features like memory protection or preemptive multitasking till 2001 -- it had neither in 1995, let alone 1988. (Win95 had both, of course.)

The reason Apple could auto-detect floppy disks is that Apple controlled the hardware. RTFA if you can't guess why that's significant.

Re:Floppy?

[hawk]

Uh, no. The 400k and 800k drives were variable speed, the 1.4M drives were not.

I'd be perfectly happy to lose as spectacularly as apple . . . :)

hawk

Re:Floppy?

[toddestan]

It's also the thing that every Mac user had a paper clip next to their computer for, mostly because Apple has a thing about not putting buttons on things.

Re:Floppy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love my disks hard.

So...

[Skiron]

... good job he didn't detect it, else the Internet would have been infected with MS Windows virus/trojans from day #1.

Detection via delta?

[Ryvar]

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?

[tomm3h]

A broken disk could most-likely complicate that idea somewhat.

Re:Detection via delta?

[ushering05401]

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:Detection via delta?

[Ironsides]

That wasn't Win95 attempting to read, that was the BIOS. The BIOS boot order was generally Floppy, HD, SCSI.

Re:Detection via delta?

[Antique Geekmeister]

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:Detection via delta?

[RiotingPacifist]

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?

[f2x]

a broken disk is going to complicate things no matter what.

Re:Detection via delta?

[drsmithy]

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:.

Re:Detection via delta?

[JoshuaZ]

From TFA: "You can't just try to figure out what type of drive the user has by comparing the clever technique against the boring "turn on the floppy drive light and make grinding noises" technique, at least not without displaying a warning to the user that you're about to do this--users tend to freak out when the floppy drive light turns on for no apparent reason. "Thank you for using Windows 95. Before we begin, I'm going to turn on your floppy drive light and make grinding noises. Press OK." So essentially, users are panicky idiots.

Re:Detection via delta?

[bigstrat2003]

Yes, because said idiots would never think to change the boot order in the BIOS...

Re:Detection via delta?

[coryking]

Why would they want to? Hard drives were for people with money.

That and it wasn't until "recent" that a BIOS would let you change the boot order. That feature only became widespread (IIRC) when people started to want to boot off CD-ROMS. And that wasn't really possible until CD-ROMS all plugged into your IDE port instead of weird proprietary cards that required weird proprietary drivers.

Back in those days, the only "feature" most BIOS's offered was the ability fool your OS into thinking your A: drive was your B: drive so you didn't have to physically swap the cable.

Re:Detection via delta?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Wanting to boot from hard drive _first_ has been a basic security configuration issue for many years now, ever since hard drives becahme large and cheap enough to become commonplace. The ability to take over a student cluster machine with a boot floppy, and in this day a CD or a USB drive, has been a security problem in large environments for those many years.

The whole CD card booting oddness you describe has to do with the BIOS itself being able to detect and access the CD drive in a well-defined way: the creation of bootable CD's is a fascinating piece of technology history itself. But the advent of bootable CD, DVD, USB, or other removable issue doesn't change the basic issue of keeping crackers with physical access from booting from their own media.

Re:Detection via delta?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Sure you can fallthrough!! I've installed perhaps a dozen servers this way in the last few years, via CD, via PXE, via USB or an attached SCSI device. As long as there's not a boot record and the drive isn't marked with a 'bootable' partition, I've never had a problem doing this: the key is to make sure to do 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[hard drive] count=20' from a Linux environment to be sure of seriously scrubbing any MBR and the partition information.

I'm not sure if marking a partition on that drive 'bootable' causes problems, and installing a boot record certainly does. But the above trick works just fine with brand new drives or drives that have been zeroed.

Re:Detection via delta?

[coryking]

Right, but did most BIOS's out there let you change the boot order? I don't remember, honestly. About the only time I can really remember is once CD's became mainstream.

So yeah, you are right from a security perspective. I just dont know if what you want existed back then.

Re:Detection via delta?

[adolf]

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 interesting to me.

If it's not interesting to you, then get off my lawn, kid, and go fuck with your water cooling rig some more and post the results on Twitter or something. Don't come whining here.

K? Thx.

Re:Detection via delta?

[PRMan]

This makes sense, since it's impossible to boot Windows 95 from a Floppy Disk.

Great idea. 15 years too late, but nice thinking!

Re:Detection via delta?

[V!NCENT]

Hey! My ASUS EeePC has that feature switch in the bios!

Where did I put that SlowNewsDay tag?

[BlueBoxSW.com]

???

Re:Where did I put that SlowNewsDay tag?

[GuldKalle]

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

[Zero_DgZ]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I dont know how they do it on these days but 2001 when Windows XP came out, there was only a few Linux-distributions what used automount. Mandriva was one of the first ones to use it and even then it brought lots of problems for USB-devices like digital cameras and memory sticks.

Now those problems are on the Windows (Vista and 7) because to remount drive after umount you need to unplug it and plug it back so it would get reconized.

Re:Obligatory Linux Comment

[damn_registrars]

if you want Windows to autodetect floppies for you... Buy an LS-120 drive

That sounds like a great deal. Hunt all over the planet for a drive that isn't made anymore, so that when I use a floppy in windows (I've used a total of about 2 of them in the last three years) it will be auto-detected.

On top of that, the LS-120 would most likely be a USB drive anyways, which would already do autodetect whether it was an LS-120 or just a regular 1.44.

Not trying to be mean here, I just don't see the need in 2009 for floppy-disk autodetection. I have a 4gb usb drive in my pants pocket that I never leave home without; why would I care about floppies (granted, I don't fix other people's computers anymore)?

Re:Obligatory Linux Comment

[adolf]

I have an LS-120. Even used it once. It seemed fast. I left it there for a few months, and never used it again.

My older computers have the floppy drives removed to provide better cooling to the hard drive(s). My newer computers have better cooling for the hard drives by design.

I haven't used a floppy disk in at least two years. (I do have an external drive if the need ever arises, but I no longer have any media for it.)

Re:Obligatory Linux Comment

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Just out of curiosity, what mechanism does Linux use to do this?

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.

Re:Obligatory Linux Comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, being Apple, you happened to know the magic for each drive you shipped and didn't need to train.

Controlling the whole system means knowing whatever you want about it.

Re:Obligatory Linux Comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure, back when I did have a floppy on my Linux machine, I used command-line floppy tools to manipulate files. And a few years before I found out about those tools, I mounted/unmounted the floppies from the file system. The interesting thing is that if a floppy is mounted and then the floppy is removed before being unmounted, Linux doesn't know about that until the floppy was unmounted (which was kind of amusing to write files to an empty floppy drive).

near technological break-thrus from Microsoft

[mutantSushi]

Hmm... I was going to make a comment on archeo-tech, but then I remembered the computer I'm typing on still has a DVD drive/burner. In any case, wouldn't the obvious solution have been using the inefficient spin-up method to check "for sure" if there is a floppy or not, and using that info and the "no spin up" code, figure out which of the 2 drive types it was, and use that going forward?

Re:near technological break-thrus from Microsoft

[coryking]

Except for that to work, you'd need to know when the person replaced the drive with a different one. That that is actually impossible with floppy drives.

Re:near technological break-thrus from Microsoft

[Rakishi]

Check on every windows start then, problem solved.

Re:near technological break-thrus from Microsoft

[coryking]

Except you need a floppy disk in the drive to do the test. If you did it every time windows started, you'd have to ask the user to insert a floppy disk.

Re:near technological break-thrus from Microsoft

[Rakishi]

No you don't, you simply need to know if there is a floppy or not. You get this by checking using a different less efficient method (spin up) for the presence of a floppy.

To be fair..

[tomm3h]

...I'd always thought this was impossible with basic FDD tech. How wrong was I. :)

(AND I run Linux. I just haven't used an actual FDD with a mainstream distro since I switched. Kinda glad it's that way around, actually!)

Is it just me?

[edivad]

I clearly remember that one of the very first releases of NT 3.0 had a feature like that. You could insert a floppy and automatically the OS was trying to read/detect the content of it.

Re:Is it just me?

[imamac]

I clearly remember that my Apple ][ GS had a nifty little feature like that...

Re:Is it just me?

[Bert64]

And the Amiga...

Re:Is it just me?

[jonbryce]

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:Is it just me?

[Mr Z]

Right, but Apple's ][GS floppy drives were rather different than the PCs. They even spin the disk at variable speeds to store more on the outer tracks. (The article says inner tracks, but it's got the story backwards.)

Re:Is it just me?

[dhanson865]

or since you had to reboot after a crash anyway you could just hold the mouse button down during the reboot and the floppy disk would eject automagically.

Paper clips were nice for when the OS thought it ejected the disk but physically it was still in the drive. Then a paper clip saved you from rebooting.

Re:Is it just me?

[bhtooefr]

Actually, the drives that the IIGS used had an eject button.

(Then again, all it did was tell the OS to unmount the disk. But, if there was no active OS, it assumed it was unmounted, IIRC. I'm not sure how it handled a crashed OS, but a quick Apple-Ctrl-Reset got you out of the OS...

Re:Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

> But Apple computers required you to unmount your floppies before you could get them back.

Why is this modded informative? It's not informative. imamac was talking about the Apple II series, but guess what: it also applies to the Macintosh.

Original Apple II/II+/IIc/IIe hardware used 5.25" drives, where floppy insertion/removal was manual -- no need for a paper clip.

The motor-based ejection mechanism was only on 3.5" drives, which was made available on the Apple IIGS and as an external drive for the Macintosh. There were numerous models. Most of these drives had an Eject button (more on that in a moment), as well as a paper clip hole for manual ejection:

http://www.vintagemacworld.com/drives.html

Assuming GSOS ("the Finder") was functioning, pressing Eject would both unmount the drive *and* eject the disk. You could drag the floppy disk icon to the trash if you wanted -- you'd get the same result either way. This was common on Macintosh machines without the Eject button (which is what you're describing).

On the IIGS, if you were running some non-GSOS software (e.g. ProDOS, custom OS stuff, whatever), it made no difference -- the ROM automatically handled ejection in this scenario, unless the programmer chose to explicitly lock the drive. If the programmer chose to lock the drive, and the software crashed, a soft reboot (Control-Open Apple-Reset) would suffice for getting Eject to work again.

You only had to bother with the paper clip method if the actual Eject button was broken, the ejection mechanism was damaged, or (most common) the disk had some physical problem. The most common reason I saw for use of the paper clip was a bent aluminium media guard on the disk -- insertion would worked fine, but ejection would fail. Using the paper clip would suffice, but would risk leaving the metal guard inside of the drive, or worse, the spring.

Re:Is it just me?

[againjj]

Or hold down the mouse button on reboot.

Legacy code...

[Narnie]

So, you're telling me that this might be ready by the time Windows 7 is released?

Re:Legacy code...

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's battle cry: "Better late than never.. unless we're getting paid for the 'never'."

i always forgot if my duke nukem floppy was in...

[Denihil]

maaaan, i could have saved HOURS OF LABOUR. HOURS!!!!!! Thanks, Micro$oft. Just another failure in your long list of FAILURES.

You also have issue of replacing floppy

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:You also have issue of replacing floppy

[ikono]

couldn't it be tied to the device id?

Re:You also have issue of replacing floppy

[coryking]

Device ID? What is this "plug and play" you are speaking of?

You didn't have to have a floppy drive plugged in to have an "A:" drive. On the PC, if you tried to access the non-existant "A:" drive, the computer would assume you just needed to insert a disk. It didn't know you don't own a floppy drive!

The only way to "detect" the floppy drive was manually in the bios. You could tell the damn thing you had one of the new 2.88mB drives* when all you really had was a 360kB 5 1/4 drive.

Kids these days with their plug-and-play facebooks and their blue ray cassette tapes. Why USB cable is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached!

* I dont know what the hell you'd need all that space for either. I guess people using C instead of assembly...

Re:You also have issue of replacing floppy

[Anonymous Coward]

2.88 millibytes?

Macs

[Ukab the Great]

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

[Antique Geekmeister]

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

[Blakey Rat]

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:Macs

[Joce640k]

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:Macs

[denzacar]

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.

Re:Macs

[ThrowAwaySociety]

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.

Re:Macs

[Viol8]

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.

Re:Macs

[Achromatic1978]

And it had nothing to do with being the 'correct' drive, either, just the 'same' drive. The problem was certain models responding one way, others responding differently.

Re:Macs

[HAKdragon]

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?

Re:Macs

[adamstew]

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

[MichaelSmith]

Dragging the disk to the trash was a way to un-mount the volume

I wish gnome would do that. It seems very intuitive to me.

Re:Macs

[coryking]

Microsoft having to run on shit hardware.

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:Macs

[Anonymous Coward]

You do not recall correctly. It's always funny when someone tries to be all smug and superior and they turn out to be totally wrong. I usually take it as a sign of deep insecurity.

Re:Macs

[coryking]

Oh... and that electronic floppy ejection system, which was controlled by the OS, might have had a part in that too.

Man was that cool or what? I mean, watching your Mac friend eject a disk without hitting the eject button! Oh the envy!

When USB first came out and they started offering USB floppy drivers, I always wondered if some company would sell an "enhanced" floppy drive for PCs that had an electronic eject. It would have required a non-standard driver, but would it have been cool or what!

Re:Macs

[Blakey Rat]

Dragging the disk to the trash was a (poorly-conceived) shortcut to the "Put Away" command. You could also use Command-Y, or select Put Away from the Special menu. People who actually *used* Macs generally were aware of this.

The theory was that "Put Away" put whatever was selected back where it belongs. If it was a file or folder on a desktop, it goes back to where it was before it was moved to the desktop. If it was a floppy disk, it meant you were done working with it and you can put it back in its box.

This is as opposed to "Eject", which should have read, "Eject, but remember for future use." Or, "Let me put in another disk, but I'm still using this one too."

Anyway, the thinking behind the feature was fine. Apple somehow slipped that "drag icon to trash" shortcut in, and it's been a point of criticism since. Not only is dragging the disk to the trash not the only way to put away a disk, it's not even close to the best way.

Re:Macs

[Blakey Rat]

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.

Re:Macs

[NJRoadfan]

Unless you had an Apple IIgs. Its external drives had an eject button. Oddly the same eject button was disabled by MacOS when you connected the drives to an older Mac with an external floppy port.

Re:Macs

[denzacar]

I always felt that it was a trouble just waiting for the right moment.
Like, power loss or the system crash so you would then have to use a paperclip to eject it manually.

I would have felt a lot calmer if zip and floppy drives had mechanical and manual ejection system back in the days before USB drives.

Re:Macs

[gleffler]

No, actually, it didn't. Eject Disk was almost always the *wrong* thing to click in classic Mac OS, because it would assume you wanted to keep it mounted, and would then start asking for the disk over and over again the next time you switched into another app. Instead, you were supposed to use "Put Away", or, like the GP said, drag the disk to the trash can.

Re:Macs

[bonch]

You're so uninformed, I'm not sure why you even bothered posting and revealing it to everyone.

Re:Macs

[bonch]

Or you'd just hold the mouse button on bootup and auto-eject the disk. You should just stop posting.

Re:Macs

[PRMan]

Actually, funnily enough, I remember a guy that replaced his floppy on a Mac with a PC drive and had this exact problem (had to manually detect floppies after that).

Re:Macs

[Antony T Curtis]

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.

Re:Macs

[mzs]

That was true, also about how hard they were to plug into the drive, I quickly learned to plug them into the drive and snake the ribbon cable through while putting in the drive. Then it was simple to plug the cable to the board.

Re:Macs

[blindseer]

Actually, funnily enough, I remember a guy that replaced his floppy on a Mac with a PC drive and had this exact problem (had to manually detect floppies after that).

How does one even connect a PC style floppy drive to a Mac and get it to work as intended? I'm not aware of any Macintosh model that had the hardware for interfacing with a PC style floppy drive. Are you perhaps mistaken and confused a PC running an emulator with a real Macintosh? I could fathom a USB floppy drive that lacked drive insertion detection during the early days of iMacs when Apple stopped making floppy drives standard equipment. How does one induce media detection on a Macintosh when the drive lacks the ability to detect that itself? Through the use of a drive utility? I suspect that would get old real quick.

Re:Macs

[FrankieBaby1986]

Don't mean to troll, but... Who the hell thought that up? Hold down the mouse button at boot to eject all disks? WHAT? How does one come up with that association? Almost as bad as dragging to the trash!

Re:Macs

[Haeleth]

People who actually *used* Macs generally were aware of this.

So you say. I have yet to meet such a person, even among people who've been using Macs since the 1980s.

Re:Macs

[SPY_jmr1]

Except... Floppy drives. Which IIRC, had pin 1 on the opposite from the power.

All the rest though is sadly true. Bent pins, pin keys, etc. Most shops had a box or drawer stuffed full of ribbon cables of every shape and size.

Re:Macs

[toddestan]

Floppy drives didn't seem to care about that standard at all. Some were that way, and others were not. I'm sure the ones that were that way were purely by accident. On the other hand, I think almost every single harddrive and optical drive I ever had to connect up had pin 1 closest to the power.

I'm not sure if it was by design or not, but when the cable was on backwards, the access light would be on all the time so you at least knew immediately what was wrong.

This was a non-feature to begin with...

[koh]

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.

Re:This was a non-feature to begin with...

[Chris Pimlott]

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.

Re:This was a non-feature to begin with...

[GuldKalle]

But if you read the follow-up, 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.

Re:This was a non-feature to begin with...

[iluvcapra]

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.

That's sortof a false sense of security, no? Better that they be infected by the MBR when they go to read the disk than when they insert it? I guess there's an issue here with users habituated to a certain way of working, but that's not a very good justification; I suppose all those Win95 users thought they were infected with a "virus" when all their windows had a blue frame instead of a white one.

Re:This was a non-feature to begin with...

[ion.simon.c]

...they figured out that users were not trained to expect a floppy to spin immediately upon insertion...

No. The feature was canned 'cause they couldn't figure out a good time/UI to test which one of the two types of floppy drives were installed in the system. If they had managed to figure it out (see later in this thread for a really good way to do it), then a floppy disk inserted in the system would *not* have spun up. It would have been detected with no moving parts at all. When you went to access it in Windows Exploder, it would have moved. (Or if the autorun app that was installed on the disk ran.)

Re:This was a non-feature to begin with...

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay. Putting a floppy with autorun into the drive.

Phase 1: Detect disk exists
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Autorunning disk

Please enlighten me as to the contents of Phase 2 wherein it determines that the disk has autorun information without spinning it up.

How about veryslownewsday?

[bigsexyjoe]

I mean this was "who cares?" ten years ago. Now it's well beyond that.

Re:How about veryslownewsday?

[Overly Critical Guy]

One of the most annoying things about Slashdot is people who post to a story questioning its relevance or quality.

If you think the story shouldn't have been posted:
- Why did you click Read More?
- Why did you write a reply? Did you think people care about your opinion on stories so much that you needed to post?
- What's wrong with simply discussing interesting technical history? This is a nerd site.

Re:How about veryslownewsday?

[bigsexyjoe]

One of the most annoying things about Slashdot is people who post a reply to a comment questioning its relevance or quality. If you think the comment shouldn't have been posted: - Why did you click on it? - Why did you write a reply? Did you think people care about your opinion on stories so much that you needed to post? - What's wrong with simply discussing interesting inanity of slashdot? This is a nerd site. You see it's Saturday afternoon. I don't have a ton to do. I clicked the story to see if it was really as inane as I thought or if it was actually more interesting. When it sucked, I posted a comment making fun of the story (or actually agreeing with someone else). Why? I don't know, I guess for fun. If you think about it, why should I ever post to or read this site anyway.

Re:How about veryslownewsday?

[msimm]

If you think the story shouldn't have been posted:

Or maybe to provide feedback so that the maintainers of the site simply knows how the reader feels.

Frankly, this should simply be another kind of moderation but it seems like the moderation system has long been out of development. Still, this is another way to moderate stories (or editors).

Re:How about veryslownewsday?

[iNaya]

One of the most annoying things about Slashdot is people who post to a comment questioning its relevance or quality.

If you think the comment shouldn't have been posted:
- Why did you read it?
- Why did you write a reply? Did you think people care about your opinion on comments so much that you needed to post?
- What's wrong with simply discussing the relevance of the story? This is a nerd site.

Hypocrisy FTW!!

Re:How about veryslownewsday?

[guyminuslife]

Answer: because I wanted to make sure I wasn't the only one who was thinking, "who cares?"

Re:How about veryslownewsday?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Wow, you posted an entire spastic paragraph--your second post in a story you claim not to care about. Clearly you DO care--not only about the story, but about what I think of you. You even follow it up with a link to a kook lefty site. Stereotypes galore (Chomsky story on the front page, what a surprise!).

Re:How about veryslownewsday?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Another person already wrote an "I'm going to flip things on you!" post. It wasn't clever then, either. It's not "hypocrisy" to question why somebody would click Read More to a story they didn't think should have been posted.

Did you actually say "FTW" like a 14 year old kiddie? Do you live on 4chan and Facebook and use emoticons like ^__^?

Re:How about veryslownewsday?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Oh, god, and we're so glad you did!

Re:How about veryslownewsday?

[guyminuslife]

Thanks. I appreciate your support.

Re:How about veryslownewsday?

[iNaya]

Take a chill pill ^.O I was the one being hypocritical, I was making what some would call a joke ~ albeit with my weird et sarcastic sense of humour ^.^

:-P kekeke

And yes, I agree that it is silly to complain about a story that a lot of people would find interesting - read something else! But insults do not the world turn.

Re:How about veryslownewsday?

[Dog-Cow]

Piracy is ethically no different from a mob looting a store whose locks were broken.

Modern copyright law is no more moral than shooting someone after you've beaten them to death.

OSNews

[sharperguy]

This was on OSnews two days ago. Hurry up ./!!!

Re:OSNews

[icannotthinkofaname]

Hurry up ./!!!

What is your problem with the current working directory? Why is it slow? Do you just need to start working in a different directory or something?

Or is there some other news site called "Dotslash" that was slow in posting a story, and you happened to post in the wrong thread?

*google searches for "dotslash"*

...hmm.... Okay, you clearly have a problem with the current working directory. Hopefully, a more knowledgeable user can help you with that.

Re:OSNews

[sharperguy]

argh...

I have my doubts...

[cdrguru]

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.

Re:I have my doubts...

[glavenoid]

The problems with DMA continued well into the XP era, particularly with optical drives which would often reset to PIO mode for no apparent reason.

Re:I have my doubts...

[anss123]

The problems with DMA continued well into the XP era, particularly with optical drives which would often reset to PIO mode for no apparent reason.

IIRC scratched CDs could knock down the CD drive into PIO mode.

Re:I have my doubts...

[Helldesk Hound]

? Anyone comparing this to Apple doesn't understand the
> problem. With Apple there was one hardware standard
> and only one, since 1984.

This is because Apple developed the OS in conjunction with the hardware it was to run on.

MS only developed an application (Windows) to run on top of an OS (MS-DOS, originally called QDOS and purchased from a third party) that was itself a plagiarized from CP/M, which was a system that was customized for every multifarious hardware platform it was released for.

Thus, you have from the beginning on the one hand a unified hardware and software platform, and on the other hand an OS that was originally designed to have a part of it customized for each hardware platform it was put on.

MS-DOS/WIN9x was from the beginning bound to suffer from the diversity of non-standard hardware that MS knew manufacturers were selling.

This was a problem of MS's own making.

Re:I have my doubts...

[glavenoid]

Hmmm. That makes perfect sense. Perhaps several years too late, but still.

Re:I have my doubts...

[whiledo]

This was a problem of MS's own making.

Yes, and they paid dearly fo... oh, wait.

Re:I have my doubts...

[anonymousmeatbag]

Even if floppy drives for PC clones had DMA capability there was no support form BIOS, or more likely floppy drives were too different for easy support via BIOS. Most of floppy drives could not even be rewired for DMA enabled operation. The only model that could be modified to respond to commands from DMA capable hardware as far as I know was Panasonic's JU-257A floppy drive.

Re:I have my doubts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah going through BIOS offered the best compatibility, hence you could boot win 3.x from pretty much anything that you could assign a drive letter (like parallel port Zip drives for instance.) Since win3.x didn't automatically detect and install drivers for hardware like win9x, manually installing drivers to enable additional functionality was the only way to go.

I think you've confused 32-bit "disk access" with 32-bit "file access." The former was included with 3.1, the latter was new with 3.11. 32-bit file access was a file system and cache re-written in 32-bit code (taking advantage of linear addressing and 32-bit memory moves) that was noticably quicker than going DOS and SMARTDRV.

And this is relevant because...?

[Hugonz]

It's not like it's 1995 anymore....

Re:And this is relevant because...?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Questions to ask yourself if you don't like a story Slashdot has posted:

- What's wrong with discussing it for the sake of nerdy discussion?
- Why did you click Read More on the story instead of scrolling past it?
- Why did you click reply and write a post to the story?

Re:And this is relevant because...?

[icannotthinkofaname]

- What's wrong with discussing it for the sake of nerdy discussion?

Only the fact that for a discussing something this old, one must be extremely bored to carry it on, because there is no longer a problem to fix. Heck, the storage media that is the subject of this story has been obsolete for quite a while.

- Why did you click Read More on the story instead of scrolling past it?

(1) You don't use a web feed? I have a Slashdot RSS feed on my Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar. That's where I clicked from. In other words, I never click "Read More". (2) I was hoping the posted story would be somehow relevant to today's technology.

- Why did you click reply and write a post to the story?

To answer your silly questions.

Re:And this is relevant because...?

[troll8901]

Thank you, Overly Critical Guy. That's a good one. I just don't have your guts to say it out.

Re:And this is relevant because...?

[Lost Engineer]

Why did you click reply to the guy and write a post to the guy who posted to complain about the story?

Personally I clicked read more to read to the comments to find out why this story is interesting. I was disappointed.

Re:And this is relevant because...?

[Cochonou]

Only the fact that for a discussing something this old, one must be extremely bored to carry it on, because there is no longer a problem to fix. Heck, the storage media that is the subject of this story has been obsolete for quite a while.

So, in essence, you mean that people interested in history are very bored people ?

Re:And this is relevant because...?

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

On the contrary. I've observed that there are still some places that actually use floppy disk drives -- places that are too stingy to get decent computers and will get anything that fell of the back of a truck. And, if this is a business that happened to get a contract from the government for services, then not only you might have to deal with them, but they have no incentive to upgrade.

It has also been pointed out elsewhere that this is worthy of a nerd discussion. I mean come on -- Microsoft, old computer technology, fond memories of cracking open and repeatedly stepping on the insides of broken disks...

Re:And this is relevant because...?

[icannotthinkofaname]

Not quite. History in general can still be applied to the modern day, so that we can hopefully avoid repeating things like the situations leading up to WWI or WWII or similar bad times.

However, I see no viable application of this particular story to today. Win95 is obsolete. Floppy disks are obsolete. Everything about this article simply does not matter.

Now, given that I'm really not any sort of computer expert yet (so I don't know this, myself), can you tell me where to apply lessons from Win95 almost having floppy autoplay to today's world of computers? I don't see a situation that will be influenced by this particular almost-added feature.

How often would THAT happen?

[denzacar]

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.

Re:How often would THAT happen?

[troll8901]

IMHE - floppy drives are on of those things you could salvage even from a case that was partially burned or submerged in water.

In your humble experience, your casing was on fire, so you poured water on it?

Lots of other systems had this feature

[ksattic]

Systems that relied on specific hardware (i.e. Acorn, Amiga, Atari, etc) were capable of this feature. It's nothing special.

Re:Lots of other systems had this feature

[anss123]

Systems that relied on specific hardware (i.e. Acorn, Amiga, Atari, etc) were capable of this feature. It's nothing special.

The Amiga didn't use special hardware. I'm not entirely sure what they did but the read heads changed from track 0 to 1 and back, casing a ticking noise if the drive was empty.

Re:Lots of other systems had this feature

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

That's what they did by default [if my memory serves me], but you could install something (or change a config option or something) that allowed floppy detection *without* the clicks. I believe the reason Commodore didn't do this by default was because they couldn't be sure it would work with all floppy drives.... just like Win95 I guess!

Re:Lots of other systems had this feature

[ksattic]

What I meant is that these systems didn't have clones, so the OS could assume all hardware was "special", i.e. one of a small number of drives. Thus it could easily make assumptions about how the drives would behave.

Re:Lots of other systems had this feature

[anss123]

That's what they did by default [if my memory serves me], but you could install something (or change a config option or something) that allowed floppy detection *without* the clicks.

I remember now. Floppy drives are supposed to have a sensor that prevents software from destroying the drive (by crashing the heads into the walls perhaps?). On some Amiga models they had omitted that sensor which was bad since it caused the "no click" fix to destroy the drive.

Or so the all caps warning said :-)

Re:Lots of other systems had this feature

[anonymousmeatbag]

Wrong. Commodore Amiga used standard industrial floppy drives, (as did Rolland for theirs midi boxes). Note: standard industrial floppy drives have noting in common with floppy drives used in Atari, Amstrad CPC and PC clones except for data storage medium. Amiga had capability of detecting floppy disks without spinning them, could use up to 4 floppy drives on single controller and DMA access was default mode for floppy use.

Ticking sound was meant as a reminder to prevent damage that could occur if hardware / cables were removed while Amiga was powered on. It could be silenced, an patch (CLI) command is available on http://aminet.net/disk/misc/anticlick.lha and the exe size is 178 bytes.

Re:Lots of other systems had this feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Floppy drives are supposed to have a sensor that prevents software from destroying the drive (by crashing the heads into the walls perhaps?).

I guess that heads move so fast that they need inertial dampers on at all times to prevent unwanted crash.

Re:Lots of other systems had this feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Ticking sound was meant as a reminder to prevent damage that could occur if hardware / cables were removed while Amiga was powered on.

No, it was to detect when a floppy disk was inserted. Read about it here

Re:Lots of other systems had this feature

[anonymousmeatbag]

Again, wrong. If You have EVER opened an Amiga 500 floppy, you could see the sensor. The sensor that is not present is tho one that detects the other end of the head motion, that is usually track 81, on better drives 82.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what type of floppy drive an Amiga 1000 uses, I never had A1000.

But I do have an Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200, both in working order, and a pile of external floppy drives, and internal floppy drive from Amiga 2000. Every single one of them has 0 track alignment sensor and uses it. The only way to get the different click sound is to deliberately ignore state of /TK0, pin 15, and to order head position to decrease. It is possible, but will not occur unless you disconnect the sensor.

If You need an photo of Amiga floppy with sensors, e-mail me on junky_space_fee(a_t)yahoo.com

Re:Lots of other systems had this feature

[anonymousmeatbag]

Amiga used hard wired control pins for managing floppy drive. As far As I can remember control pins used for disk detection were:
11. /CHNG Disk change, Low state == No disk in drive
14. /WPRO Write protect
15. /TK0 Disk drive head over track 0.
The key pin was pin 11. On a PC floppy drive pin 34 was disk change, surprisingly it was never used on Windows.

I know the feeling.

[anexanhume]

I know what it's like to not have your floppy detected upon insertion.

Re:I know the feeling.

[troll8901]

It's better than the hard one, where you have to perform insane surgery and connect it directly to the guts within. (Ewww.)

I question this.

[Jane Q. Public]

I don't know who wrote this article, but I have questions about its veracity.

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:I question this.

[bami]

If I understand the post correctly (to lazy to read TFA), some floppy drives gave back a "0" when a floppy was inserted, and other floppy drives gave back a "1". So Microsoft dropped the feature instead of having to "train" the program which value represented which state by the user.

This was of course no problem with systems that had properly spec'd floppy drives: they'd always return the same value for the same state, so they could implement that feature.

Re:I question this.

[Jane Q. Public]

Yes, I had read the article, but I misunderstood it the first time through. I thought they were saying that the spin-up routine was giving ambiguous results.

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.

Um..

[PhasmatisApparatus]

Typical narrow-minded Microsoft thinking. Couldn't they have just done the autodetect, then immediately tried to read from it, remember which result was correct?

Re:Um..

[Samschnooks]

Typical narrow-minded Microsoft thinking. Couldn't they have just done the autodetect, then immediately tried to read from it, remember which result was correct?

Instead of the training session? Interesting.

FTFA: You can't just try to figure out what type of drive the user has by comparing the clever technique against the boring "turn on the floppy drive light and make grinding noises" technique, at least not without displaying a warning to the user that you're about to do thisâ"users tend to freak out when the floppy drive light turns on for no apparent reason. "Thank you for using Windows 95. Before we begin, I'm going to turn on your floppy drive light and make grinding noises. Press OK." Floppy disk insertion detection is not a sufficiently compelling feature that users will say, "I appreciate the benefit of going through this exercise."

I think that's what killed "your" idea.

Re:Um..

[IntlHarvester]

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:Um..

[kbg]

The correct way to do this is when the OS is being installed for the first time. If it is being installed from the floppy, well then the problem is solved. If it is being installed from CD-ROM the you have a check in the installing routine to display text "Checking floppy" or something and spin up the drive and store the results. If the floppy was installed after the OS was installed you check it in the first boot after that. A small spin up in the boot up after installing a new floppy drive is a small step for having automatic auto detection for the floppy drive.

Re:Um..

[beuges]

Typical slashdot thinking, reading a few words in the headline or summary and then building up an opinion without actually knowing any of the details. If you read the article, and the followup article, you'll see at least 50 comments all making the same suggestion, even after the author explained why it wouldn't work.

Re:Um..

[anss123]

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.

I saw a floppy drive benchmark in an old computer mag. Gave me a chuckle, especially since I thought all floppy drives were created equal.

Re:Um..

[coryking]

q: How do you know when there is a new floppy drive in the system.
a: When the BIOS says so.

q: How do you know when the user replaced the floppy drive with a different one?
a: You dont.

In other words, "auto detection" doesn't exist for floppy drives. Not even the BIOS knew if you really had a floppy drive--you had to tell it you had one in the BIOS setup.

Re:Um..

[kbg]

So the only edge case is when the user changes floppy drive from A to B type. This would mean when the user booted up next time the OS would think that there was a disk in the floppy drive even tough there wasn't and would try to spin up the disk only to find out this wasn't the case and correct the detection. Of course if the user had inserted a disk before booting up this would be a problem and would be the only problematic case.

However auto detection for a floppy disk versus not detecting a disk only after a change from A to B type floppy drive and only if inserting a disk before boot and having not accessed it at least once, seems a small price to pay.

Having a detection in the boot up with a spin up would of course also solve the problem, with a small time penalty.
I think if I remember correctly I think Windows 95 already accessed the floppy at boot up?

Re:Um..

[IntlHarvester]

The IBM 2.88MB, the Cadillac of floppy drives ;)

Follow-up Article

[VGPowerlord]

The article's author, Raymond Chen, posted a follow-up article 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:Follow-up Article

[bonch]

The followup article didn't exist yet when I submitted the story on Thursday.

Amiga the alternate music

[mrmeval]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn9VkoOO3EA

ok, but...

[yup2000]

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!

[catmistake]

I got a first post. Why didn't anyone tell me?

Re:This is great news!

[fm6]

You got a first post.

Fond memories

[hackstraw]

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 floppy and barely multitask while waiting for the read/write to finish. Most all OSes sucked at the time in different ways regarding removable media.

I'll take my 2GB USB thumbdrive over a floppy any day. Actually, my 2GB thumdrive is almost 3x the size of my harddisk back then. My how things change.

Re:Fond memories

[anss123]

Also new in Win95 was that you could read/write to a floppy and barely multitask while waiting for the read/write to finish. Most all OSes sucked at the time in different ways regarding removable media.

My Vista box isn't any better than my old Win95 box when it comes to removable media. Still have to wait for hard drives, Cd drives and what not to spin up despite having no intent to use them.

Re:Fond memories

[guruevi]

Most all OSes? It depends on what you tried. OS/2 could duplicate floppy's without even blinking (you literally wouldn't even notice), Unix and Amiga were multitasking, NeXT was as well and some of those had really well-written SCSI subsystems that would initiate certain commands and let the controller figure the rest out (like block copies) so you didn't tie up the CPU (damn you ATA/USB).

The only ones that weren't were DOS and it's derivatives Windows 95-ME was as much a shell over DOS as Windows 3 (since you can a) replace the kernel and basic io-system with other DOSes like Novell and DR-DOS and b) exit out of the graphic shells and you'll fall back into DOS) so it couldn't 'really' do multitasking although giving the impression.

For some or another reason DOS found it important enough to let the floppy tie up the whole system whenever it needed access

Re:Fond memories

[LocalH]

so it couldn't 'really' do multitasking although giving the impression.

Um, Win95 could preemptively multitask 32-bit tasks - crudely at times, perhaps, but it could do it. It only kept cooperative multitasking around for 16-bit compatibility.

For of all sad words of tongue or pen..

[RevWaldo]

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
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

Actually there were viruses that did this in DOS

[clusterix]

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.

Suspicion? What about other less suspicious ideas?

[pikine]

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 user could have replaced a floppy drive with an "opposite" one.

Another idea is to always show the floopy disk icon when the system first starts, regardless whether there is a disk in the drive. If the user clicks on the icon, attempts a read. Determine the polarity of the spinless floppy presence algorithm at this point and compare the result. If read succeeds, keep the icon. If the read fails, ask the user to insert a disk to try again or cancel. If the user cancels, remove the icon. You have now determined the polarity and can do spinless detection reliably.

What about?

[NervousNerd]

I wonder if some of the pre-release versions had this feature.

Re:Suspicion? What about other less suspicious ide

[Lehk228]

so you confuse the shit out of the user by having ghost floppies show up every boot?

Who cares

[maliqua]

Wow a news article about floppies and an acient operating system.. good find slashdot..

It's not tooo late

[CranberryKing]

to add it to Windows 7. Now that's an upgrade worth paying for!

Big deal

[AmigaMMC]

AmigaOS 1.0 did that

Re:Big deal

[British]

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).

Re:Big deal

[NJRoadfan]

PCs came with controllers that only read MFM encoded disks. Apples (and I think Amigas) originally came with drives that read GCR encoded disks and supported variable spindle speeds (this is how they crammed more then 720k onto a disk). Since PCs were dominant, when HD floppies appeared both Commodore and Apple standardized with MFM and released disk controllers that were capable of reading both formats for backwards compatibility.

Re:Big deal

[StormReaver]

It's no big deal that the Amiga did that, because Commodore controlled the production of hardware and could guarantee that hardware behaved a certain way.

Intel/PC hardware manufacturers are a crap shoot when it comes to making hardware that conforms to specifications, so it's a much harder trick to create a standard operating system device driver API that behaves the same way across device classes.

Re:Big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

You're talking about Apple. Amiga supported 880 kB on DD disks not by variable speed, but by doing away with sector gaps. This way they could fit 11 sectors per track instead of the 9 sectors used on PC. The method they used was ingenious: instead of relying on a relatively stupid floppy controller circuit, they had an even more basic floppy interface that simply did clock synchronization and dumped the floppy bit stream into memory (and vice versa on writing).

The GCR/MFM coding was done pretty much entirely in software. The clock synchronization in the floppy interface did have to be informed whether to expect a GCR or MFM signal, but they already supported both in the first version of the custom hardware. And to put one hardware trick on top of another, the software decoding actually used the video blitter chip to implement the bit operations.

Re:Big deal

[noidentity]

Oh yeah, I remember Amiga... the disk drive constantly clicking every few seconds. It made you always keep a disk inserted just to shut the damn thing up.

Re:Big deal

[anonymousmeatbag]

Pin 34 should be /DISKCHANGE on "PC" floppy drives. No one seems to use it.

Re:Big deal

[AmigaMMC]

I sure did :)

Re:Big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga drives didn't do the variable spindle speed. So an Amiga drive could only read/write a portion (about 1/3 I think) of a Mac disk.

Real reason

[randomProof]

The reason reason this feature was removed was to keep from having a thread repeatedly checking the floppy drive. I'm sure CD-ROMs and such send an interupt when discs are inserted, but not the floppy drive.

Re:Real reason

[anonymousmeatbag]

You should check the pin outs on the floppy drives. /DISKCHANGE signal is ether on pin 11 or on pin 34.

Another Windows 95 amazing autodetection

[gmuslera]

It could detect when an user is just watching the screen, coloring it blue to show that was successful. Was impressive how reliable worked that.

Good Feature

[pgn674]

I would have absolutely loved that feature. I hated it when I would open up My Computer (or what ever the various drives display window was called at the time), and it would freeze for a few seconds while my floppy drive would spin up. I think this feature could have been included as an option. Basically, by default use the spin up method, but if an exploratory individual went into the floppy drive properties, there was a training button sitting there waiting for them.

BFD

[g0at]

Congratulations; the Amiga and the Mac were already doing that in 1987 (or earlier).

-b

Good solution is in the comment thread

[Anonymous Coward]

Good solutions to the problem can be found in the comment thread of Raymond's article, although Raymond pretends not to have read those here. On the one hand, I really love his insights in Windows' architecture, but on the other hand I must admit that he can really be an ass when he knows he's right and closes his mind to all possible evidence to the contrary.

Umm...ok...

[Gary Perkins]

...and?

Still was unable to use a floppy and multitask...

[alexandre]

Meanwhile it was unable to copy to/from a floppy without slowing down to a halt... go figure as in linux it didn't affect the computer at all!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Actually there were viruses that did this in DO

[coryking]

Considering the only way most software was installed on a machine was via a floppy disk, wasn't your example the most common case? Unless you mean they basically implemented the "detect disk /w-out spinning up and if disk is in, write crap?"

Come on man...

[coryking]

You could have taken the cheap shot by slightly altering your sentence to:

But Apple computers required you to drag your floppy disk icon into your trash bin before you could get them back

Much more colourful.

Or if your computer crashed, you had to get it out with a paperclip.

IIRC, didn't they also have one of those pinholes somewhere on the case so you could do a hard-reset on it? I forget...

Re:Come on man...

[jonbryce]

Yes, and you generally stuck a paperclip into the hole. You had to push it in way to far for a pen to be any use.

Wow

[eclectro]

If the computer can detect and spin up a cdrom drive, what's wrong with doing the same thing for a floppy? This would be a great feature to add to Linux. Yes, everything is moving away from floppies, but there is a *ton* of legacy systems that still require a floppy for one reason or another.

Re:Wow

[anonymousmeatbag]

Why detecting the spin up? There is a signal line named /DISKCHANGE that should be used to detect if floppy disk is in drive. On PC floppy drives it is pin 34, but state that describes that disk is in drive is not determined by standard, i.e. it might be different on different drives.

Re:Non-system disk or disk error anyone?

[VGPowerlord]

Of course Windows damn well knows automatically when a floppy is inserted...
The number of times I had to remove a floppy from my mom's non-booting PC is probably higher than the number of bytes in Wikipedia's servers.

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.

I used the floppy events

[SpiceWare]

to trigger audio samples from radio version of "The Hitchhiker's Guide". It would play "Thank You" when a floppy was inserted and "Glad to be of service" when it was ejected. If I remember correctly those were the doors in the Heart of Gold.

Click

[Dan East]

AmigaOS 1.0 did that

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

Re:Click

[Anonymous Coward]

runback setnoclick

Re:Click

[Anonymous Coward]

You had programs that stopped the clicking. At least on version 2.

Re:Suspicion? What about other less suspicious ide

[ion.simon.c]

The way I see it, Windows 95 could do a read with or without the floppy at start up.

That's the very first thing that popped into my head when I finished reading the article. I wish that we'd get all of the context behind the situation to understand why these obviously good ideas aren't implemented.

Re:Non-system disk or disk error anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

The computer was not detecting a floppy, rather it was using a bios routine on startup to seek for a floppy assuming there was one in the drive to boot from and spinning it up no matter what. If the drive returned a false on being able to read the floppy for whatever reason then the bios would try to read the boot sector of a hard drive and boot from that instead. This hails from the days of DOS when not everyone could afford one of those fancy $900 10 megabyte winchester hard drives. Of course with most modern motherboards this is now adjustable and completely removable.
Some early Linux versions did this (I think Suse may have had this once) which would occasionally spin up the drive and try to read it so that a windows user would not have to deal with the concept of "mounting." However it was annoying to me to hear the floppy drive trying to be accessed every five minutes.

so youre arguing for non-open architecture?

[Anonymous Coward]

you are arguing for a closed spec (Apple), and against the open IBM PC architecture, which was a legacy of its open ISA beginnings, where anyone could build an addon card in their garage.

i find it hilarious on to find such a sentiment on slashdot. if here is a gene for revolution it must be closely related to the gene for hypocrisy.

Re:so youre arguing for non-open architecture?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if I agree with you there. The problem the comment above is almost touching on is that in PC land for far too long, people have cut corners by saying, "oh, we'll do that in the driver." So the model is, hardware vendor comes up with a hardware design, and says we'll do a certain amount of things in software, write a Windows driver and they're done. Whereas what would be more ideal at least from a Linux user's perspective would be a standard interface for most functionality, and have hardware vendors simply work based on that.

Windows 95 Almost Did A Lot Of Things

[wideBlueSkies]

But it failed miserably at everything.

Never quite made it, really.

Re:Windows 95 Almost Did A Lot Of Things

[WolfWithoutAClause]

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.

You laugh

[coryking]

But I wager most kids under the age of 15 have never actually seen a floppy drive. In addition, I doubt they've seen a cassette tape and I bet many have never seen a video using VHS.

What is funny is I bet when those kids have children of their own, the record player will still be used.

What is really nuts though, is our kids will be doing crazy shit we never dreamed of because unlike us, they grew up with cell phones, the internet and the web. Wait until they come of age and things will really get interesting.

Re:You laugh

[hawk]

?What is funny is I bet when those kids have children of their own,
>the record player will still be used.

It's been more than ten years since my tour in a help room for undergraduates.

I gave a classic pizza & records example.

Then I looked at him, and asked, "But you've probably never seen a record, have you?"

"Just how old are you?" was the response.

*sigh*

hawk, still grabbing records at thrift shops

internet protocol stack

[Anonymous Coward]

if anyone remembers installing Trumpet tcp/ip stack in windows 3.11 to get on the internet........ well.... i for one, was very happy with this fancy new windows 95 thing that had it included in the operating system.

and the 'start' menu was great. not that linux didnt have it already in some window manager, but it has been copied over and over because it works pretty damn well, both from a mouse jockey and a keyboard jockey perspective.

Raymond Chen is awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Say what you want about Windows and how this sucks, and that sucks, but Raymond is an awesome guy.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Uhhh...

[SeNtM]

Why do we care?

Re:Suspicion? What about other less suspicious ide

[coryking]

You have now determined the polarity and can do spinless detection reliably.

Until the user replaces the drive with a different one.

Nah..

[denzacar]

Two different cases of casings.

One was inside the storage area that caught on fire.
Not particularly big fire, and the case itself was only "licked" by flames before the fire was put out - but the plastic on/off and reset buttons on the front of it melted and the case was to be written off and thrown out.
Since it was an old Pentium - no great loss. Floppy drive worked though. Kept it and years later when a friend needed a floppy drive, I dug it out of a box - and it worked.

Similar story with the other box - only different storage room and this time it was bad drainage and couple of days of rain.
Water was simply coming out of a wall the whole night. Quite a sight to see in the morning.
This floppy also worked - but it smelled bad. Ended up throwing it away in the end as I already had couple of spares.

Re:Nah..

[troll8901]

Thank you for explanining, denzacar! I was actually making a joke, but I learn a lot from your experience too.

Sounds like you do a lot of work related to warehousing, and have seen PC desktops/minitowers kept in dusty conditions.

Re:Nah..

[denzacar]

Sounds like you do a lot of work related to warehousing

No, not really... My workplace was always desktop-based, but the companies I worked for had their storage spaces and such.
Which were usually cramped and overstuffed.

and have seen PC desktops/minitowers kept in dusty conditions.

That I have seen. :P

I don't want my computer to do that

[willoughby]

I want my computer to do nothing until I *tell* it to mount the floppy (or whatever) device. I want it to obey my subsequent commands and then unmount the floppy (or whatever) device *only* when I tell it to.

twenty year ejection

[epine]

Apple somehow slipped that "drag icon to trash" shortcut in, and it's been a point of criticism since.

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.

Re:twenty year ejection

[Galactic Dominator]

I once built a case out of a cardboard box(and the handyman's secret weapon). True story, ISP I worked at was too cheap to actually purchase even a low end system(major irritation since a $6000 Mac was sitting across the hall I've hated them ever since). Now this was well after the time period you reference in your post, as I ended up with 4 -5 different HD which totaled about 1.5GB in available space. It was on this unit I constructed my first freebsd system running 2.2.8 w/ X and some faux Win 95 interface. The grey beard on-site was rather amazed it worked, since this setup used two power supplies and they were not operating in redundant fashion. I needed two to power all the HD, FD, CD-ROM components. Hobo worked quite well for a long time.

Anyways, that's a really long way of telling you don't let a little thing like inadequate case space stand in the way of getting it done.

Re:twenty year ejection

[coryking]

style points.

It isn't style points, it is fundamentally unintuitive. The first time somebody told me to drag the floppy drive into the trash to eject it, it asked them twice if they were serious and it wasn't going to somehow erase my data. Even after they reassured me, I felt a bit worried it would nuke my data.

You put stuff into a trash can to throw it away. On a computer, that means deleting the file. Once you start assigning magical properties to your trash can (which represents something rather serious and potentially destructive), the metaphor breaks down. I'm not sure what metaphor you could use for ejecting a disk, but dragging it into the trash isn't one of them.

"Style Points". Style points would have been "they used brown as a color scheme instead of hot pink". No sir. This isn't style points--it is flawed design.

Re:twenty year ejection

[againjj]

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.

Virtual memory was around since System 7 in 1991. It may have had somewhat different behavior from other OSs' implementations, but that was due to historical reasons.

Oh yeah?

[Slur]

Well, my first Mac was an Amiga - so there!

Floppy formats

[ErkDemon]

Yep. The old PC floppy handling sucked.

The floppy disk format that the PC //supposedly// used (which I think might originally have been a general Sony specification) included parameters for things like number of sectors and number of tracks, and other OSes like the Atari ST would tend to handle these details correctly, but PCs wouldn't.

PCs would always assume that the number of tracks was (eighty?) and the number of sectors was (something), regardless of what was actually written into a floppy's format descriptor thingy.

So if you formatted a floppy on a PC, you could usually use it on just about any other computer, but if you formatted the disc on a non-PC, you often had to use a special utility to make sure that the disc was formatted with the particular "special" version of the format that a PC would be guaranteed to be able to read. It was a pain in the arse.

Autodetect + autostart

[Kindaian]

So the nightmare of autodetect/autostart could have being started way before?

Not a good idea...

More importantly...

[IdahoEv]

... why was this story even run?

An article about a feature that a 14-year-old operating system didn't have?

Slow news day much, Slashdot?

Re:Actually there were viruses that did this in DO

[clusterix]

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.

Almost...

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost? This is news? Almost doesn't count for anything!

14 years from now: Vista almost autodetected common hardware without freezing.

Microsoft

[dereference]

Microsoft should ask this MSDN blogger to do some UI consulting for 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.

Consistency in an operating is indeed a high priority, but the designers at Microsoft think they know better and suggest "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:Still was unable to use a floppy and multitask.

[Rod Beauvex]

2000 can do it too, and I think the earlier NTs could also.

This was not a Microsoft issue...

[Anonymous Coward]

Vendors were building drives in both ways, that was the mistake. That's a good reason why we have "standards", so thing like this wont happen... much...

Diskette change line...

[Antony T Curtis]

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.

And what kept them from doing what's safe?

[fadir]

What kept them from auto-detecting floppies during a Windows session?

Example:
1. insert floppy, do something, detect mechanism
2. request disk2
3. auto-detect that disk2 has been inserted
4. keep auto-detection during the Windows session
5. after Windows restart goto 1

That sounds seamless to me, is easy to understand and doesn't cause any trouble. (I guess the few people that swapped their floppy drives during a Windows session are negligible.)

so....

[smash]

... they almost managed to achieve Amiga 1985?

Re:so....

[anonymousmeatbag]

... almost is never good enough.

beginning of another idea...

[BrokenHalo]

...and this is where Clippy was born:

"I see you have just inserted a floppy disk in the drive. Would you like me to completely fuck it up for you?"

NoClick

[Sits]

There was an Amiga utility called NoClick that could stop the clicking but it looks like it had some risks with 3rd party disk drives. It worked well on my Amiga A1200's internal drive though.

Do not want to spin up....

[leuk_he]

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."

Clearly wrong reasoning here.

This is exactly how MS defined how a cd would react to a drive insertion. About now there is a problem that the autorun stuff is an inidation of a virus. PTrue: people worries a lot because the hard disk was showing all kind of activity wihtout they doing something. But extending that behaviour to floppy would be no problem.

At least they should have had an option to enable autodetection somewhere in the settings.

1985 AMGIA!!!

[JFilz]

So they almost developed something that was done with the SAME hardware 10 years prior to releasing Windows 95. That was one thing I loved from Amiga - no "Inset disk X and press enter". I had fun installing extra (generic) floppy drives and converting a standard 25 pin d-sub to work with the 23 pin custom d-sub that the Amiga used.

Correction to your problem statement

[DragonHawk]

"problem: some users are idiots
solution: treat all users like idiots"

Close but not quite. That should be:

Problem: Almost all users are idiots

As soon as you come to grips with that, many large organization decisions make sense. If they can help 80% of the customer base at the cost of annoying 5% of the customer base, they'll do it, every time. (The 15% margin is for people aren't total morons and might fall on either side.)

You had floppy disks?

[DragonHawk]

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,

On "day one" the *ONLY* option was "removable media".

Oh, I beg to differ. On "day one" the only option was no media.

The original consumer-market home micros (e.g., Apple ][, Commodore 64) didn't even come with a floppy drive. You had RAM and that was it. Maybe an audio cassette interface if you were lucky (I never could get that to work). I clearly remember being envious of the handful of Apple ]['s at school that had the floppy drive option kit (controller card and drive).

    I'm sure I'm not the only one here on Slashdot who remembers spending hours typing in BASIC programs from source code listings in magazines, debugging the typos, and then finally getting the thing working, and then leave a note on the computer saying not to turn it off or reboot it, since there was no way to save all that work.

(I'm sure someone will want to come in here and belittle me for having the luxury of audio cassettes, or RAM, or electricity, or paper, or whatever. Folks, it's been done. At least provide an original anecdote if you must play the grandpa game.)

I remember getting my Tandy 1000 SL and being uber-impressed that it came with the MS-DOS core in ROM, so you could boot to a command prompt without even a floppy diskette. I never got asked to insert the disk with the command interpreter, thanks to that.

I also worked out that when working in the DeskMate word processor, if I wanted to open a file, I could type-ahead during program load to execute the File -> Open command, and send the "Retry diskette read" command three times. You see, if I sent a retry three times, that kept the floppy disk spindle motor going long enough while I was changing diskettes (switching from program disk to data disk). Retaining that angular momentum shaved a good 0.75 seconds off the time it took to load the directory from my data diskette. Whoo-who! Now we're flying...

Re:You had floppy disks?

[adamofgreyskull]

I'm sure I'm not the only one here on Slashdot who remembers spending hours typing in BASIC programs from source code listings in magazines, debugging the typos, and then finally getting the thing working, and then leave a note on the computer saying not to turn it off or reboot it, since there was no way to save all that work.

This. I got a magazine about every once in a blue moon and, as a 9/10 year old, always became endlessly frustrated by what I am now convinced must have been deliberate typographical errors in program listings. I also still have blisters on my finger tips from winding tape back into those damn casettes. If anyone can think of anything sadder than a small boy playing around with displaying flashing color patterns from a BBC Micro...on a ~8inch black and white TV screen, then send your answers on a postcard.

That's not brain damage, that's limited function

[DragonHawk]

"PCs would always assume that the number of tracks was (eighty?) and the number of sectors was (something), regardless of what was actually written into a floppy's format descriptor thingy. "

That's because that's the only format stock MS-DOS could cope with. There wasn't any point in doing detection if it couldn't read such a diskette anyway.

Not everything bad in MS-DOS is due to brain damage; much of it is due to its incredibly limited functional capabilities. (This is not a complement.)

Here come the Amiga fanatics

[DragonHawk]

"AmigaOS 1.0 did that"

Big deal. Could AmigaOS run x86 code without a bridge board? I didn't think so.

What's that? I'm asking for capabilities that don't exist in the hardware?

Thanks for making my point for me.

Re:Here come the Amiga fanatics

[anonymousmeatbag]

http://home.mira.net/~bytey/PC-TaskScreen.html

Re:Here come the Amiga fanatics

[AmigaMMC]

Actually it could, the software was called PC-TASK, but thanks for getting totally out of topic. What the heck has emulating another OS to do with detecting if a disk is in the drive? I didn't need to make a point, but you made one for yourself. Troll.

selling point for win7

[binarybum]

...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:noClick and noFUD

[anonymousmeatbag]

http://aminet.net/search?query=noclick

Floppy disk level of suck

[bnjf]

Floppy disks sucked. There was nothing good about them. Slow, unreliable and ill designed. Fuck them and the free AOL disks they wrote on.

In the eye of the beholder, I suppose. From HCI expert Donald Norman:

A simple example of a good design is the 3½-inch magnetic diskette for computers, a small circle of "floppy" magnetic material encased in hard plastic. Earlier types of floppy disks did not have this plastic case, which protects the magnetic material from abuse and damage. A sliding metal cover protects the delicate magnetic surface when the diskette is not in use and automatically opens when the diskette is inserted into the computer. The diskette has a square shape: there are apparently eight possible ways to insert it into the machine, only one of which is correct. What happens if I do it wrong? I try inserting the disk sideways. Ah, the designer thought of that. A little study shows that the case really isn't square: it's rectangular, so you can't insert a longer side. I try backward. The diskette goes in only part of the way. Small protrusions, indentations, and cutouts, prevent the diskette from being inserted backward or upside down: of the eight ways one might try to insert the diskette, only one is correct, and only that one will fit. An excellent design.

Doesn't matter anyway

[default luser]

Without an auto-eject feature, even auto-detect wouldn't have made floppies under Windows any more streamlined. You still had to push a button every time you ejected a disk.

The fact is, the CD-ROM standard was much better thought-out, and made it easy for Microsoft to implement autorun. The industry learns from it's mistakes (eventually).

Couldn't it have trained itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

When it was directed to the floppy and saw data there it could have ran the routine and seen which call found a disk in the drive and then remembered that.