Floppy disc reader/writer status report

Philip Pemberton wrote: Yes, constantly for over ten years :-) You know, it seems to depend largely on the VM. Sun have lost the plot in the last few years and just kept on piling features in when they should have given up and declared "this is Java" about five years ago. The older VMs scream along very nicely, but I know the modern one I've got on the laptop is an absolute dog :( Generally it's very good providing you're not trying to create massive Swing applications with it using scads of eye-candy. Unfortunately that's exactly what a lot of people try and do first, and then it gets a bad rep for being slow. I'd suggest there are far better languages for writing "Hello World" in ;-) That works. I know nothing about wxWidgets or GTK+, incidentally, other than being aware that there is a Windows port of the latter :-) If I have to have some form of cross-platform graphical UI it gets done in Java (or a web browser via PHP), if it just needs a simple Linux text-mode UI then it gets done in C, and if it needs to run solely on MS Windows it doesn't get done at all :-) :-) Oddly enough I've had exactly the opposite experience to you, and it's been USB that's plagued with problems, whilst SCSI has Just Worked*. * Except for whenever I go near a bit of NeXT hardware, where the SCSI bus automagically seems to break if I so much as look at it funny. It's one of the major reasons I don't want a Catweasel, to be honest. I suspect that's open to interpretation by the drive manufacturer, to be honest. Well don't! :) Seriously, it's a project that could do with being done by someone, and in theory it is just a big, fast floppy drive full 'o bits, so if the interface can be run fast enough (and contain enough buffer memory) it's possible it could be done. More than you can ever possibly need on your doorstep via your local Freecycle list :-) I'll have a look... I'm really not sure. I don't know if those sorts of drives just looked like a big floppy disk (and control was done purely via twiddling head select / step / direction), or whether they actually interpreted the data stream from the FDC in order to carry out commands. It's not even as high as low priority (!) but I was just curious... Well I figure it's probably two or three 74xx series ICs, so it's not expensive/complex. Certainly cheaper than having to build/buy more than one card. I suppose it depends on typical application, but I suspect any serious archive box is going to have several drives attached. I think the main thing though is to have some form of addressing I/O brought out on the board which can be under software control - then there's at least the scope for doing this kind of thing. (and it sure beats having a separate parallel port bodge or something to provide that :-) Yeah, that was probably it actually. We've got quite a bit of Intellec stuff at Bletchley. cheers J. -- "What progress. It's almost as good as taping it... on tapes which self destruct in seven days." - Bill Bailey on the BBC's "watch again" service