20 May
2023
20 May
'23
2:25 p.m.
On 5/20/23 04:21, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
I was startled to discover my (long gone) Athlon XP
box could only
handle a single floppy drive. The BIOS has no option for a 2nd.
I can't imagine that was a significant cost saving.
It's a matter of pins. I believe that it started when the "SuperIO"
chip started packing in more support for various peripheral functions
and the 2 pins for drive select and motor control of an extra drive were
viewed as least important. Earlier versions of the chip often allowed
re-purposing the pins used for the parallel port as an interface for an
extra floppy--you saw this on laptop systems, which often had only one
floppy drive in any case. cf. Intel's PCISet chip sets.
--Chuck