30 Apr
2010
30 Apr
'10
11:56 a.m.
I have to laugh when people use the term
"GCR" as if it were a
standard. My response is usually "whose GCR?".
Isn;'t MFM technically a form of GCR?
Personally (and professionally), I'm less concerned about emulating
floppies than retrieving data from them and allowing people to move
on. The world in general seems to have been pretty successful in
weaning itself away from 556 BPI 7-track 1/2" tape, after all.
Not on this list :-). Many of my machine depend on floppy disks (not just
to store user files, in many cases the OS loads from a floppy).And while
I would like ot keep all my machines as original as possible, it would
also be useful to be able to use flash memory with them.
I really must get round to designing SD-card interfaces for some of my
machines. I'd m,uch rather build them myself because that way I get to
use the sort of solder I'm happiest with...
There is a lot of data still residing on obsolete and obsolescent
media. The great part is that once the world migrates from one
obsolete medium, there's always another to be declared obsolete.
So when will mechanical hard drives be on the chopping block? If you
think about it, they're really a backward technology, with moving
parts and hungry power consumption.
YEs, but what would replace them? Flash memory has too few write cycles
to be a sensible replacement for a hard disk in many applications.
I had a potential customer who wanted to replace an old AMD multibus
floppy controller board with a modern version that would support high-
density 3.5' floppies, needed to boot his system, but not otherwise
used to hold working data, I tried to point out to him that it would
be far simpler to employ an EEPROM with the needed data.
He would have none of it. He also specified that all parts had to be
through-hole and socketed.
I see nothing particularly wrong with that last requiremnt. It would make
the thing a lot easier to maintain.
-tony