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: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...?

[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.

Umm...ok...

[Gary Perkins]

...and?

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 Win95 is obsolete.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.