A story about USB floppy drives (2004) | Hacker News Reader

A story about USB floppy drives (2004)

devblogs.microsoft.com

74 pointsairhangerf1546 comments

Despite the punchline, the USB floppy spec is actually incredibly restrictive and only supports 720K, 1.25MB and 1.44MB formatted capacities. This means, ironically for a spec partially written by a friend of Raymond Chen's, that you can't read the Microsoft 1.68MB DMF floppies used for software distribution with a USB floppy, but it also means that it's impossible to support the older 400K and 800K Mac formats. To be fair, those formats also require a special drive mechanism (the disk spins at different rates depending on which track you're reading), but there's no way to expose them within the USB floppy spec. There's an entirely justifiable argument for manufacturing a separate Mac drive with different functionality and requiring its own drivers.

(Edit to fix capacity)

By the end of the floppy disk era, it was very rare to find a 400 or 800k disk that was still working, and Microsoft really didn't make much use of the DMF disks, they were replaced by CDs very quickly.

I still have a pair of USB floppy drives hanging around with the hopes of getting some more inexpensive ones at a flea market some day to make a USB based RAID-floppy array. I bet it will sound amazing.

If you ever do I hope you post it here!

It will never be as cool as this guy, https://silent.org.pl/home/2022/06/13/the-floppotron-3-0/

I still have a bunch of 400k and 800k disks that work fine

Yes me too. I recovered a lot of them. Even ones from the late 80s.

That's a story people tell, but I'm not sure how true it is. There is tons of Amiga and older Mac software out there on floppy that you can still read just fine.

Of course it's still a good idea to get a Greaseweazel and back up everything you come across.

Most USB floppy drives you can find today support exactly one format - 1.44MB disks. Reading older 720k disks has become a challenge. I bought a small pile of Dell laptop internal floppy drives from eBay because they (slightly oddly) have a USB port on the back, and still support 720k.

Yes it's very hard to interface a 360 kb floppy to USB. I found an interface but they refused to ship that outside the US. Eventually i found the greaseweazle which needs special software but it works great. And that was available here.

I would think that the most 'bare metal' way to read a 360KB floppy these days would be to use a vintage 2000 or 2001 x86 PC motherboard/cpu/RAM combo that has the standard onboard floppy drive ribbon cable header, and attach a real 360KB drive to it. Or a more 'modern' 1.2MB half height floppy drive that's known to be able to read 360KB disks.

If you find something with like a Pentium 3 1 GHz on it, it should be capable enough and with enough RAM to boot a new i386 linux kernel and userland environment, while still having direct hardware access to the FDD.

I would be surprised if you needed anything that old. I was doing some research on my 2012 vintage PC mainboard a couple of years ago, and seem to recall a reference to the chipset one generation prior supporting floppy drives. Of course, whether many mainboards actually included the header is an open question. I also have a Pentium 4 laptop hanging around that has a swappable drive bay that could use a floppy drive. Of course, finding the appropriate laptop floppy drive will be difficult.

PCs were slow to drop support for legacy hardware.

Yes you probably wouldn't need to go that old. As I recall Pentium 4 motherboards of the generation around p4 "northwood" and "prescott" still had floppy drive headers commonly built into them. Probably there's some motherboards that have FDD headers and are also new enough to run an AMD64/x86-64 understanding CPU to run a current linux kernel without having to hunt down i386-everything for the operating system install.

I think my AMD Sempron 3100+ PC has an FDD header, and it can run x86_64.

> but it also means that it's impossible to support the older 400K and 800K Mac formats

I'm trying to remember, but was it even possible to format or read 400K or 800K mac floppies on a machine that came natively with a 1.44MB drive such as a Mac SE/30 or all the other post-1990 Macs?

Yes, SuperDrives (and the SWIM and New Age controller chips) can do GCR discs. Mac OS 8 removed support for the original Macintosh File System though, so they’d need to be HFS formatted after that.

Yes, every floppy equipped Mac had the ability to read/write 400k/800k discs via the SWIM chip. Even the first couple revisions of the iMac G3 had it.

At least these days you can get boards like the GreaseWeazle that can convert these drives to read any floppy.

Although these read them "raw", I'm not sure if anyone has written a device driver to use these as ordinary floppy drives, though it would definitely be possible.

I do love having a full complement of matching translucent blue accessories (SuperDisk, PD/DVD-RAM drive, FireWire webcam shaped kinda like Orbb from QuakeⅢ with a human-foot-shaped metal stand, etc) to use with my “Blue & White” G3 tower (PowerMac1,1), so it worked on me! :)

Nine 2004-era comments now purged from Microsoft's current site: https://web.archive.org/web/20210125145431/http://bytepointe...

What OS are you running on that B&W? I have Mac OS X Server 1.23 on mine, basically Rhapsody and basically OPENSTEP.

Same here actually! https://cooltrainer.org/images/original/michiru-rhapsody-201...

I love it as a bridge machine — New World but with ADB and an oldschool serial port (from GeeThree, replacing the built-in modem). I use it as a jack of all trades and have partitions to boot 8.6, 9.2, MOSXS 1.2, Tiger, Leopard (mine has a G4).

>I’m working on a USB-powered microwave oven.

>This USB grill is joke, right ? I mean how much power can you draw from USB port (500mA at 5V = 2.5 Watt) ? Maybe it’s for cooking mini-burgers for the anorexic geeks.

Did anyone try a USB grill yet?

https://www.amazon.com/Gourmia-GBQ330-Portable-Charcoal-Elec...

Sounds like electronics are just for fans and maybe ignition? Sounds plausible.

But there were indeed some true attempts to cook with USB power alone.[1]

[1] https://hackaday.com/2022/12/01/throwback-usb-hotplate-used-...

Saw a little USB hot plate at a friends superb owl party last night. Did a good job keeping a bowl of cheese dip warm. Doubles as a wireless charger too.

I worked at Best Buy in those days. EVERYTHING was translucent.

But there were some problems. The accessory companies didn't match that Mac Bondi Blue very well. And they didn't match Blueberry, Lime, or Tangerine well either. So you'd have some weird color blue on your mouse, or gamepad, or external hard drive that didn't match up with your iMac.

I seem to remember some of the "official" accessories being able to use the right colors, but back then it was such a free for all.

Beyond colour matching, it felt like lots of companies didn’t get the subtleties of Apple’s design, and it often felt like they just took their existing moulds and did a run in translucent plastic. The pinstriping, use of white as contrast, the organic curves, the patterning on the “IO shield” - it’s all a bit more complex than just “do it in see through blue”.

The iMac turned so many gizmos into various fruity colors that there was just no hope for color coordinating them. Our HP DeskJet with translucent blue accents didn't match the Compaq Presario next to it one bit, nor did it match the graphite gray iMac that did eventually make it into our house. So many minitowers of that period had a half-assed splash of color on an otherwise beige box, too.

Apple did a good job at it, I still like looking at their fruity period all these years later, but man, the imitators were ugly af.

I once ended up being the beneficiary of Crucial making a gambit on "Mac memory", which was standard DDR memory with a different label on it. The SPD literally showed it as a different, non-Mac-specific SKU. Luckily, few people fell for this, and Crucial later unloaded the "Mac memory" at a discount relative to standard DDR memory.

Kinda related but less happy end. IIRC there was no difference between Voodoo graphics cards for PC and Mac and they could be used interchangeably. When Nvidia entered the scene they decided they wanted more money and made Mac specific BIOSs and ATI followed suit.

I know quite a few people that have paid more for "Mac" USB hard drives where the only difference is the format out of the box and maybe some junk software they never used.

> IIRC there was no difference between Voodoo graphics cards for PC and Mac

I'm not sure about that. The video BIOS is x86 code; that certainly wouldn't have run on a (PowerPC) Mac system.

Correct, but they could be cross-flashed: https://web.archive.org/web/20060511060609/http://homepage.m...

I have also cross-flashed a PCI Radeon 9200 but it needed a larger flash chip to hold the larger ROM image.

Earlier Voodoo cards didn't need to worry about video BIOS because it wasn't the primary video card. It used this wacky passthrough system where you still used your normal graphics hardware for ordinary 2D stuff, and then it switched over to the 3D card when you ran 3D software, which had to take over the entire screen. Nvidia and ATI cards handled normal graphics functions, not just 3D, so they needed to be able to come up at boot time. Later 3dfx cards added 2D and also needed Mac-specific firmware.

Were those earlier cards ever used on Macintosh systems? I don't remember that ever being a thing.

I don’t think they ever shipped with a Mac, but they were available. I had a Voodoo in a Mac clone. It was a strange setup. You plugged the monitor into the Voodoo, then ran a second video cable from the computer’s built in video out to a second port on the Voodoo. In normal operation, it would pass the video signal through, and when using 3D acceleration, it would take over the video signal.

Wild. I never ran into one of those - the only Mac peripheral I knew of which did that was the PC Compatibility Card.

My understanding is that the PC is actually the odd one out there. Many pre-UEFI devices (PowerPC Macs, Sun SPARC boxen, etc) ran Open Firmware, which used device-independent bytecode in their boot ROMs. You could swap the graphics card out of a Mac and put it in a Sun machine, and things would work. PCs, on the other hand, put x86 machine code directly in the boot ROM.

DEC Alpha systems solved this problem by using an x86 emulator during system boot to run the initialization code, thus allowing for standard PC cards to be used on a non x86 processor.

(Reference to this in some early RedHat documentation, which is about as authoritative of a source I could find in 2-3 mins of Googling: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/red...)

As a retro-enthusiast, I've always been dismayed that nobody ever made a USB 5¼" floppy drive. I know there are things like Greaseweazel that read the magnetic flux on the disc, but I just want to read and write PC formatted floppies without all the hackiness. I don't know how good GW is as a plug-and-play solution.

I have an internal combo 5¼ & 3½ drive, and I tried with a floppy to USB adapter, but it didn't show up in Ubuntu.

The drive worked last time I used it in a Windows 7 machine using a motherboard that had a floppy header.

If that drive is valuable, let me know how I should describe it on eBay and I'll give it to a friend with an account. I imagine someone can find a better use for it than sitting in my closet.

The spec doesn't support it. Any USB 5.25" drive is going to either need special drivers or would have to pretend to be a generic mass storage device, which gives you a differently weird set of compatibility issues. Should be possible to make it read/write, but formatting would be a nightmare and it wouldn't appear as a floppy drive at the OS level, just a weird small memory card reader or something.

>I don't know how good GW is as a plug-and-play solution.

Better than usb floppy drives, for sure.

GreaseWeazle is very capable and easy to use.

To this day, lots of cheap and universal accessories - mice, keyboards, optical drives, what have you - come with silly little "compatible with Windows!" stickers.

It's sort of a user-facing cargo cult for computing; we have supplied the compatibility incantations, therefore, we shall support your compatible system! If you use a non-compatible system, we shall not help you: this is an offense to the gods.

To be fair I have 2 mechanical keyboards that work with Windows and Linux but not with Macs. cf https://deskthority.net/wiki/Noppoo_Choc_Mini#Compatibility

Greaseweazle + any old standard floppy drive (3.5"/5.25"/8") is the way to go, for having a usb attached floppy drive.

Avoid usb fdds, they are burdened with a controller that do not allow track read/write, making them of very limited usefulness.

My college campus store sold colorful translucent floppy disks as recently as 2009. They felt anachronistic.

I've got a USB floppy drive from maybe nearly 20 years ago that copied the iMac translucent look but I'm pretty sure I bought it from a tech vendor where I also bought RAM and zip disks ('memba them?) in bulk and not from Home Shopping Network ...

Funny, nice short read. I won't spoil it for people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com