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retro computing

retrocmp.de

62 pointsrbanffy19 comments

One thing I really miss with flash drives, a write protect switch.

Yes, I can mount 'ro', but many (all?) Linux Desktops mount the drive write through its GUI. I have aliases for mounting and never used the pointy-clicky mount in DEs.

FWIW, I am usually in fvwm or cwm, depending on screen size, so I mount 'ro' when I want to. But a hw switch on flash drives would have been nice :)

Using an SD card (or micro SD in an adapter) connected to a USB reader might meet your needs. You can then use the SD write protect switch.

I thing I learned only recently is that the write protect switch on the SD card is not an electrical switch connected to anything in the SD card itself: it just hits a lever in the SD socket that opens a contact closure and it's up to the system (hardware and software both) to bother to look at it. So on many systems the write protect switch doesn't even work.

You might like: https://www.kanguru.com/products/kanguru-ss3

With the default ext4 filesystem, mounting 'ro' doesn't actually prevent writes to the disk. For that you need 'noload' too, to prevent journal replay. This can result in a broken filesystem if it wasn't unmounted cleanly, although assuming it's 100% read-only it shouldn't do any permanent damage (perhaps enforce read-only access at the block device level to be sure).

As a kid (ok, as an adult too), I knew what the "CH" on floppies meant. I was curious, but never asked or tried looking it up.

I forget when, but one day, it dawned on me that it said "HD"!

I guess most of my floppies had their labels on in such a way that the flap/door was facing down, so it said "CH". To read "HD," then the label would be upside down.

I just noticed that I said "I knew", when I meant "I never knew". I guess I accidentally a word there.

A trivia not touched on in the article - IBM 5 1/4" floppy drives had dual heads and could read the front and back side of a disk without flipping. For cost savings Apple ][ drives had only one head so you had to flip the disk occasionally. But to convert an IBM 5 1/4" floppy for dual sided used on an Apple, you had to cut a second write-protection notch, either with scissors, and xacto-knife, a hole punch, or with a dedicated "drive doubler" puncher.

https://atariprojects.org/2019/06/28/make-floppy-disks-doubl...

Same for the C64 floppy drive (1541).

The original IBM PC could be purchased either with 160KB/180KB single-sided floppy drives, or the 320KB/360KB double-sided. Some early IBM PC users still needed the "flippy" trick!

See IBM advert, https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-10_OCR/page/n111/mo...

I still have a few floppy disks packed away at the loft, but I wonder if they still work the next time I turn on my BBC or Archimedes.

The last time I checked, the only 5,25" floppies that still worked from that age were the ones in those Acornsoft covers.

I recently repaired an Apple II that were stored in a binder in an environment that wasn't climate controlled (for ~35 years). The 5.25" floppies had all developed a layer of stickiness, but all but one read fine once I cleaned up the drives.

I'd suggest grabbing a greaseweazle[0] ahead of that.

0. github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/

My collection of 5 1/4" floppies were mostly fine, after some thirty years. I think I had one or two (of very many) with read errors. 3.5" floppies though.. just about every "HD" (1.44MB) ones were a goner. The "DD" (720kB) fared much better.

I just feel like tech moved so fast that in SOME ways its sad.

I just wish we could still use retro tech in some way without having to replace it.

I only see a 403

https://web.archive.org/web/20251002092405/https://retrocmp....

does anyone anywhere in the world still produce diskettes... if I want to start my very old Apple ][ - what are my options?

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