
The floppy disk orphaned by Linux - rolph
https://hackaday.com/2019/07/26/retrotechtacular-the-floppy-disk-orphaned-by-linux/
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tropo
1.44 MB lived too long, yet the floppy died earlier than it should have died.
Without the power of IBM to dictate a standard, we couldn't increase capacity.
We had so many incompatible choices. We had a minor bump to 2.88 MB and the 20
MB Floptical and the 120 MB SuperDisk, all fighting for market share. The 100
MB Zip disk almost succeeded, but then the click-of-death and Iomega's foolish
switch to the incompatible Jaz drive put a stop to that. In a saner world, the
240 MB LS-240 would have been the last floppy.

It didn't help that floppy quality took a nosedive around 1994. Buyers went by
price, and then concluded that floppies were unreliable. A few years after the
floppy quality went bad, the same happened for the drives. Floppies are now
remembered for being unreliable, but that wasn't always the case. They were
quite reliable around 1993.

~~~
smacktoward
Iomega (the makers of Zip/Jaz/etc.) really was an epic case of mismanagement.
They had the future of storage seemingly locked up, and then proceeded to
fumble it all away.

I wish somebody had written a book about why they made the (extremely poor)
decisions they did.

~~~
z2
While I don't remember a single punchline on management, their media was
rather expensive at a time when affordable CD-RW drives and media basically
pulled the floor from under them. The response was kind of expected--after
flailing around on existing storage products, they released a branded 'ZipCD
650' drive to salvage what they could of the market, while trying to hide that
it was in fact an overpriced CD-RW drive that used plain CR-R/RW discs.

In retrospect, it seems really hard to keep iterating on the next proprietary
Zip/Jaz drive technology as a single company when your competition is
basically everyone else who are collectively working on portable storage with
wider adoption rates.

~~~
tracker1
They didn't license the technology under reasonable terms, for the most part
is what killed them. Even up against CD/DVD, most would rather have a zip100
or zip250 disc that was more reusable. IIRC, there was some licensing for disc
mfg, but there were price/licensing restrictions in place.

If they'd licensed disks at say $1, and the drives at $10, and let other
companies build compatible products, it would have lived a lot longer and they
may have even influenced the transition to USB thumb drives.

I worked in 2nd level phone support at one time, but had no insight into
anything the company did. Aside: the Jazz drive was effectively a detachable
internal drive, where the disks came out. A damaged drive could damage the
disks, and damaged disks could damage the drive. When an RMA happened, I'd
usually do both.

In the end they had some really good engineering, and a lot of missed
opportunities.

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smacktoward
I still remember the feeling it gave me as a kid to buy a box of 10 3.5"
floppies. That was, like, _fifteen whole megabytes_ of storage! Right in the
palm of my hand!

Jeez, I'm old.

~~~
drblast
You don't have to feel old! Unless you had to razor blade a cutout in a single
sided 5.25" floppy so you could write to the back...

~~~
LocalH
I was apparently fancy, I was given a notcher when I got my C128 as a kid :P

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neilv
I once read a cyberpunk story, in which elite hackers, tackling some black
ice, used ridiculously vintage gear for protection.

If someday the fate of humanity rests on a raiding a museum and booting m68k
Linux from the floppy of a 128K Mac, as a daring last stand against the space
alien armada, we're going to feel silly for not having working drivers.

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davesmith1983
This is a shame. I still use floppy disk with Linux as I can write force the
drive to write in 720k mode which is necessary for older computers such as
Amigas and Atari STs. USB floppy drivers can't write to 720k for reasons that
I will admit I don't fully understand.

This is going to cause me a major headache as Linux was my last choice really
when it came to floppy drives. I am already keeping an old desktop Core 2 Quad
around just because it as a proper floppy controller.

Why couldn't the driver be left in the kernel I have no idea.

~~~
heinrich5991
>Why couldn't the driver be left in the kernel I have no idea.

As far as I can tell, the driver is not going away. It's just no longer being
maintained.

~~~
rocky1138
Yeah and after so many years of polish, it'll probably still work for decades
without a maintainer.

Also don't forget that it's not required for people to update to a new version
of Linux the way it is for Mac or Windows. If you want, just never update. Or,
worst case, keep an old machine around at a working version of you don't want
your main computer to go out of date.

~~~
davesmith1983
While the machine is old relatively it is quite happy running discord, vscode
and a web browser and I use it in my office as my main dev machine. I don't
want to have to go through the hassle of running two operating systems or
compiling a custom kernel.

Well we will see what happens I suppose.

~~~
CydeWeys
It sounds like you're entering the realm of sufficiently niche to the point
that you might need two computers (or at least dual boot). I've been there for
decades, though not for the exact same reason.

~~~
davesmith1983
Yeah you are probably right. I think the last version of Windows that runs
well and has a proper floppy driver is XP-64 bit (basically Windows Server
2003 64bit).

OpenBSD will probably work well if I swap out the Geforce 8800 GPU with an AMD
GPU of some sort, I am sure I could get a relatively decent one second hand.

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Wowfunhappy
What does "orphaned" mean in this context? Was the code removed from the
kernel? Still in the kernel, but no one knows if it works?

~~~
dfeojm-zlib
Not removed, just quasi-deprecated and no maintainer.

~~~
birbbarker
So who'll volunteer as tribute? Someone must be able/want to?

~~~
jotm
Why? The hardware has been "stable" for about 2 decades now. I reckon you'd
have more trouble with the IDE/USB interface drivers these days. God knows
connecting an old LPT CNC machine to a modern computer proved ridiculously
hard - ended up just using a very old laptop with an integrated LPT
port/controller :D

~~~
sp332
I don't think it's about new features or anything, but running regular
regression tests to make sure that changes elsewhere in the kernel don't break
it.

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em-bee
in 2001 i got a sony picturebook (with the transmeta cpu) and i had trouble
installing linux because the kernel failed boot because it could not find a
floppy drive. (i was booting from a usb floppy the bios was emulating as a
normal floppy, while linux later was detecting it as a hard disk. because of
the emulation, the kernel expected to be booting from a floppy, and so it
insisted on looking for one)

i don't remember how i solved the problem, but i do remember rummaging in the
kernel sources to see if i could figure out how to disable that floppy check.

so we have gone from a point where the floppy was seemingly mandatory to a
point where it is finally dead.

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finnjohnsen2
CD next!

