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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?
What's a Floppy?
So, you're telling me that this might be ready by the time Windows 7 is released?
greed@All_Evils:~#
One of the signficant problems with DOS and Windows 3 was what appeared to be a policy from Microsoft. They refused, for hardware compatibility reasons I am sure, to make use of DMA with floppy drives. Similarly, until Windows 95 there was no use of DMA except by third-party drivers at all.
The result of this was that any Microsoft backup utility ran at half (or less) the speed3 of any DMA-using backup utility. Also, if you didn't have a third-party DMA driver, hard disk access was considerably slower.
Windows 3.11 finally included what was apparently a licensed DMA driver for 32-bit hard disk access. It did not appear to have too many compatibility problems, but there were some. If anything, I would see this as reinforcing the idea of continuing to use BIOS access for the floppy drive and BIOS access only.
There was some relaxation of this with Windows 95, but by no means was it complete. DMA continued to be under-utilized for I/O, partly because of kernel design and partly because of hardware compatibility issues. With more rigorous standards from Microsoft about how stuff is required to work, somewhere around 1999 we started getting more "standardized" hardware for the Windows world.
Anyone comparing this to Apple doesn't understand the problem. With Apple there was one hardware standard and only one, since 1984.
Reading would require a spin-up.
The article only says that the non spin up method was an extremely clever chain of commands so..
We are sitting here talking about MS tech for no apparent reason with no apparent hope of arriving at any sort of conclusion...
Why am I here again?
You had something resembling a hardware spec, you lucky beggars. One thing that has slowed Linux development has been the plethora of weird hardware specs that Microsoft and their partners designed and supported, and people in Linux-land are expected to have "just work" despite this kind of specification insanity. In fact, when I can, I prefer to buy hardware that is listed as "Macintosh compatible" because the specs are so much more reliable and the quality is generally higher.
You can do a lot of stuff when you control the hardware as well as the software. Apple just installed the correct drive in all their machines in the first place.
It has nothing to do with Microsoft "being stupid", it has to do with Microsoft having to run on shit hardware.
Comment of the year
I know what it's like to not have your floppy detected upon insertion.
But Apple computers required you to unmount your floppies before you could get them back. Or if your computer crashed, you had to get it out with a paperclip.
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?
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.
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.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Floppys were the worst too. There was like no standard way to put in the ribbon cable so that Pin-1 on the cable hit Pin-1 on the drive. Some of the ribbons had a filled hole to act as a key--some of the disks had a pin there so that cable didn't work. Some of the disks were designed for the key'd ribbon, but all you had on hand were non-keyed cabling. Some of them had a plastic key on the ribbon so they wouldn't work on the drive missing the slot for the key.
None of the disks had a plastic mold that surrounded the pins. That lead to you connecting the ribbon so the pins were all off by a row. Then when you pulled out the ribbon, it was very easy to bend all the pins.
Keep in mind you were usually doing all this while the disk was screwed into the case and tucked into some god-awful location too. So you'd be inserting this ribbon essentially blind. As a result, every drive I owned had pins that were bent to shit because it would take like 4 try's to get the damn thing working. And worse, you'd never know if you didn't hook it up right until you booted the box and tried to read from the drive.
Oh and if you did manage to get them working, the media was so unreliable that sometimes you could take a brand new disk, write to it, carry it to class and find all your data corrupt. Woe is the fool who didn't write the same file to two disks, lest he arrive with nothing but a bad disk.
Floppy disks sucked. There was nothing good about them. Slow, unreliable and ill designed. Fuck them and the free AOL disks they wrote on.
Yah.
You have to remember, a lot of people on Slashdot posting about Classic MacOS never actually used it. Most of them only adopted Macs after OS X came out, but they like to pretend they were part of the "Classic Club" by giving us little gems like the post you replied to.
If you even slightly think something said on Slashdot might be wrong, go with your gut.
Comment of the year
The same one that Apple did 20 years ago. The same one that Microsoft bagged 15+ years ago. The some one discussed in the article.
If you're asking how it does it without "training", then you could read some of the other posts for solutions. Easiest being when the user clicks on the drive and there's a floppy in there, remember which flag meant a disc is there and do it from then on. Not perfect at first, but for the rest of the time (assuming no hardware change) it will be. If there's a hardware change, then remember that flag instead.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
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.
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.
...but they've worked it out and plan to release it in Windows7 as a key selling point. I'm pumped, this will make installing kings quest 1-4 much easier.
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