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Comment by parsimo2010 | Hacker News Reader

parsimo2010

The floppy disk drivers were no longer being maintained. They were orphaning the drivers and they would eventually rot as the rest of the kernel changed around it. Then someone else stepped up to take the position of maintaining the driver.

It's significant because a) some dude out there still has working floppy disk drives and feels that they might still be used, and b) this basically proves that Linux has the best legacy device support.

If they didn't maintain this you would be stuck keeping an old computer alive that had a floppy drive and a CD burner, to burn any data you needed to a CD, then another old computer that has a CD drive and a USB port to move the data off a CD (/s, but only kinda).

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> this basically proves that Linux has the best legacy device support

Floppies still work just fine on Windows 10, you know.

They absolutely do! I write floppies fairly often for some 90s era music sequencers and drum machines.

Music equipment is why I still have floppy drives, as well.

My Yamaha PSR-700 series workstation keyboard uses floppies as its primary memory, and still works fine.

Its replacement, Yamaha PSR-SX700, is coming out in October 2019 at MSRP of $1,999, and is not fundamentally different. (And if I use the 90s version to control Korg Monlogue / Deepmind / etc to get the sounds, then the marginal value of the new instrument goes way down).

So floppies it is.

There are floppy emulators that look electrically like a floppy but take USB or SD memory. Eventually I'll swap in one of these.

And PC's would still have floppy disk drives and RS232 ports if it wasn't for Steve Jobs :)

You say it as if having them were a bad thing.

The fact is, people who want floppy drives in their PCs can still install them. And RS232 is alive and well on Raspberry Pi.

On the other hand, the mobile world is suffering a lot from the "removing ports is a good thing" stupidity. That's how you get cell phones without a headphone jack, and laptops without a (micro)SD card slot and no USB-A ports (even when the space clearly permits them).

The ports that aren't used disappear gradually without the need to be "brave" (e.g. DVD bays from laptops).

*Serial is still alive and well on raspberry pi and other embedded devices; rs232 is a more specific protocol which defines voltage levels (higher than the 3V of the RPI), flow control, line length etc.

Well, Firewire probably would have won if it weren't for Steve Jobs too.

> If they didn't maintain this you would be stuck keeping an old computer alive that had a floppy drive and a CD burner, to burn any data you needed to a CD, then another old computer that has a CD drive and a USB port to move the data off a CD (/s, but only kinda).

If I understand it right, the USB floppy drive drivers were still maintained; it's just the old ISA (now LPC) floppy controllers that were orphaned.

actually doesn't vmware use the "old" isa emulation to add floppy drives as config drives?

> some dude out there still has working floppy disk drives and feels that they might still be used

I don't know if I would ever use mine (maybe with MESS emulation for my TRS-80 Color Computer?) - but I have a small collection of 3.5" and 5.25" working floppy drives (plus cleaning disks, alignment disks, and an analog Tek oscilloscope) that I keep around "just in case" - mainly for emulation purposes, or for some odd time I might need one. For both, I also have collected at least one of each of low-density, double-density, and high-density drives - because again, different systems. The only kind of drives I don't have that were common back then were the 5.25" ones on the Apple IIe - because they were crap back then that'd break if you so much as looked at them. I doubt few have survived in working order today (seriously, they were that bad - you take one of those drives and compare it with a TEAC or similar from the era - night and day).

I have an Apple IIe with a couple extra drives and a large collection of software on ancient disks. It was working last time I fired it up about 10-15 years ago, but I fear disappointment so I haven't messed with it lately. It all just sits in a sealed bin in the downstairs hall closet.

I tell myself I keep old hardware around in case general purpose computing dies or descends too far into user-hostile dystopia, but I'm probably just a hoarder.

I still have a redhat 9 machine with a 333Mhz pentium3 cpu, 5 1/4 floppy, 3 1/2 floppy, Yamaha scsi CD burner an adpatec 2940, and a Promise Ultra100 TX2 PCI IDE Controller for strage old IDE disks. It also has a soundblaster with the wavetable addition for that old-time midi goodness.

It connects via a 100mbs 3com 3C905BTX nic. I call it the network attached device driver.

Just 2 and a half years ago I was running the kernel 4.10 on such equipment - AMD K6-2 300MHz, 3DFx Banshee (AGP2x), Trident 9440 (PCI), television card bt878, sound card Maestro, SoundBlaster Creative. Everything worked. I am sure that it would also move under the latest 5.3-rc2. A bigger problem is with the right (ready) userland (i486, i586) than using old hardware with the latest kernel.

> you would be stuck keeping an old computer alive that had a floppy drive and a CD burner, to burn any data you needed to a CD, then another old computer that has a CD drive and a USB port to move the data off a CD (/s, but only kinda)

I had to use exactly this workflow a while back. SCSI based CD burner too, which I still have... just in case.

Thank you for you service, floppy driver guy, wherever you are.

Having worked in IT, this is entirely plausible. In fact I've had to do that entire runaround except with different technology.

No need. There is still USB floppy support which is not affected by the removal of the floppy driver.

We've a system at my employer that has a 5" floppy, IDE CDRW drive (yes they exist) with USB 1 so that we can pull off some really ancient software every couple years.

My pentium with a floppy disk drive has ethernet, so i just copy the files over the network. It's kinda slow, but not as slow as burning a CD (who am I kidding? The box has a CDROM drive, but it's read only). I use this setup to get the photos off my Sony Mavica.

Though it's been years since I used one, I'd still put floppy drive support in the "obvious" category. I suppose it's noteworthy that it no longer had a maintainer.

On a new MacBook Pro I can plug a USB floppy drive and works. I have one.

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