Subj : floppy disks are cool!
To   : mary4
From : Ben Collver
Date : Sun Apr 21 2024 11:55:03

  Re: floppy disks are cool!
  By: mary4 to All on Sun Apr 21 2024 22:33:42

My first computer had two 5.25" floppy drives, so there's a nostalgic
place in my heart for floppies.  A year or so ago i inherited a Pentium
with a corrupted filesystem.  It came with an optical drive but the
BIOS was too old to boot from it.  So i had to boot from 3.5" floppy to
recover data from the disk and install a new OS (FreeDOS 1.3).

I have a couple of USB floppy drives.  I read that they are not all
made the same.  Some are way faster than the original floppy drives
ever were, but have subtle compatibility issues.  In other words,
some USB floppy drives write floppies that cannot be reliably read
on retro hardware.  Others are more compatible.

I've had fun working on challenges to fit lots of functionality onto a
single floppy.  I've done a few projects of my own, and i remember
others:

* A DOS boot disk with a dial-up PPP Internet stack, DOSLynx, telnet,
  etc.
* BasLinux, a Linux live-floppy with a surprising amount of
  functionality.  It uses kernel 2.0.  A second floppy contains X11.
* QNX

.