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

[kbg]

No we bitch about how you can get infected by a virus/adware with AutoRun, not that AutoRun in it self is bad. If Windows was designed properly then you wouldn't get infected with a virus by automatic running of a program.