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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."
Why not do the behavior detection on first instance a floppy disk was used?
I mean this was "who cares?" ten years ago. Now it's well beyond that.
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Yes, and that's been a danger since day one. The removable media should _never_ have been the default: it should have been the fallthrough boot medium, to keep idiots from booting with floppies or later CD's and USB devices automatically to take control of your hardware.
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...
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.
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".
What?
AmigaOS 1.0 did that
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:.
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.
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AmigaOS 1.0 did that
Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
Better known as 318230.
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.
Kid-proof tablet..
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.
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.
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.)