An option - Re: the beginning of the end for floppies

On 28 Apr 2010 at 19:01, fjgjr1 at aol.com wrote: I posted a fairly long list of emulators not too long ago. $275 is on the high end--the Chinese version of these (which perhaps is the same as the one you describe) can be had for about $50. It's not much--just a uC and some "glue". There are at least two DIY versions on the web. But none of the off-the-shelf versions is going to help with my Brother word processor (uses GCR to put 240K on a 3.5") or a real DEC RX02 disk (uses DEC's own version of MFM) or an early Lanier word processor (uses hard-sectored 8" MMFM recording) or those 5.25" floppies sitting in my drawer that work with Drivetec 2MB and 4MB drives. And no one, that I'm aware of, claims to be able to handle copy- protection emulation. It's sort of odd, a lot of embroidery equipment originally ran with paper tape, then substituted external boxes with floppy drives for the paper tape reader. Now, I guess we're substituting flash-based floppy emulators for the floppy-based paper-tape emulators. I can hardly wait until we start flogging flash memory emulators to plug into the floppy emulators that plug into the paper tape emulators... --Chuck