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Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 16:32:40 +0200
From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>
To: Frank Leonhardt <frank2@fjl.co.uk>
Subject: Re: click-click in floppy disk drive
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On Wed, 23 Oct 2013 15:21:15 +0100, Frank Leonhardt wrote:
> The rot set in with the move from 8" to 5" in my view. Okay, before the 
> SA400 they weren't exactly standard but the cut-down interface missed 
> off the commonly fun fun lines like the one to tell you if the door was 
> open and the "lock door", to prevent the luser from whipping a diskette 
> out when you didn't want them to. Oh! What fun we had with that one :-)

Have a look at MacIntosh computers and Sun workstations: Their
3.5" floppy disk drives did not have a mechanical eject button
so as long as a disk was being accessed or mounted, the (l)user
could not forcedly get the disk out of the machine. :-)

I still have a "museum computer" here that operates with 5.25"
floppy disks from the 1980s. The funny and surprising thing:
It's _fully_ functional and the disk don't show any sign of
degrading behaviour. Of course that's not a system one would
use today for any kind of productive work, but the system itself,
and all its components, still work as intended. Let's see if
(and how) a "modern" laptop or PC from today would behave in
the year 2048, which is 2^11. :-)


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...