More and more
machines are showing up without physical support (ie:
a select) for drive B: ... I have two Intel P3 board which do not
drive the B: select (which is very annoying since these are two of
the best systems for handling oddball formats with Imagedisk).
Floppy drives are disappearing completely from some new machines,
and I doubt it will be long before the controller disappears along
with them (if it hasn't started already).
That I suspect will still be built into the support chips since it will
be too much trouble
to remove it. Floppies are now a extra option -- I had to have new
computer built with one.
Everybody is going to R/W DVD's now..
First the drives/cables go, then the connectors (why pay for a connector
on the board that "nobody wants") - eventually the FDC itself may go
when new chipsets appear (next round of CPU).
Me: I hanging on to my stash of P1/P2 full ISA machines...!
Regards,
Dave
--
dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools:
www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html