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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
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.
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.
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.
All comments are properties and trademarks of the voices in my head. Not like I'm gonna claim them.
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.