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

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.

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.