On Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:03:07 +0100 (BST)
ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:
I think I bought my last floppy drive about 15
years ago. It was a=20
name-brand (Teac) and I bought the service manual too. Never had any=20
problems with it...
So surprise. In 1995 floppy drives still had a quite good
quality.
But they went down the hill in the late 90'is.
Ah... So your oan is not about floppy drives per se, but the fact that
more recent floppy drives are pieces of crap. On that you will get no
arguments from me. I acutally wonder if they bother to align such drives
at the factory, the price makes me wonder if they can, and tests on a
couple of such drives indicate they're not aligned properly...
8"
flppies where already gone and replaced by 5.25", when I got my
fingers on a computer for the first time.
My first floppy drive was a 5.25"
one ()on a TRS-80 Model 1). This has=20
not stopped me from obtaing 8" drives since then :-)
Well. In the meantime I
got two 8" drives and media too, but never used
them. I even wrote a driver for the RX02 8" floppy for NetBSD/VAX.
I do use them. One of my favourite machines only has a signle 8" floppy
drive and a winchester hard disk.
Though, I wrote that driver with a 5.25" drive
connected to a third
party controler that emulates a RX02. I don't own a real RX02.
I do... I'ce even disassembled and commented the microcode from one
(well, it was something to do on thr train between Birstol and London...)
-tony