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

On 29 Apr 2010 at 21:05, Kieron Wilkinson wrote: Yes, I believe I posted a link to it. But understand, that it's not a "know nothing about the floppy, just stick this thing in and go" type of device. Software must be coded to accomodate the recording method and organization that you're using. I have to laugh when people use the term "GCR" as if it were a standard. My response is usually "whose 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. 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. 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. --Chuck