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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."
What's a Floppy?
isn't that some of what makes Windows so exciting? autorun on media insert...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
So, you're telling me that this might be ready by the time Windows 7 is released?
greed@All_Evils:~#
maaaan, i could have saved HOURS OF LABOUR. HOURS!!!!!! Thanks, Micro$oft. Just another failure in your long list of FAILURES.
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
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?
I know what it's like to not have your floppy detected upon insertion.
Bingo. There must have been some other reason they didn't include this feature, as that solution is obvious and simple.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn9VkoOO3EA
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
And thus, didn't occur to the Microsoft engineer...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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?
to add it to Windows 7. Now that's an upgrade worth paying for!
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.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
...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.
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