Deprecating / Removing floppy drive support

[Bob Bishop]

Hi,


> On 4 Dec 2017, at 09:26, Willem Jan Withagen <wjw at digiware.nl> wrote:
> 
> On 03/12/2017 13:18, Alex Kozlov wrote:
>> On Sun, Dec 03, 2017 at 11:56:27AM +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>>> --------
>>> In message <20171203113341.GA68792 at ravenloft.kiev.ua>, Alex Kozlov writes:
>>>> On Sun, Dec 03, 2017 at 12:00:28PM +0100, Gary Jennejohn wrote:
>>>>> On Sun, 03 Dec 2017 10:27:57 +0000
>>>>> "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Incidentally FreeBSD is/was the only modern OS which could
>>>>>> still read 8" floppies.
>>>> Well, with proper* cable you can connect 8" drive to fdc and read
>>>> it pretty much on any OS that supports floppies.
>>> Uhm... no ?
>>> 
>>> Very few OS's have had 8" format compatible settings since CP/M
>>> and even fewer handle the track46 pin correctly on write.
>> I'd done it in dos, I read about successful setups for Linux and
>> Windows(older). Anecdotally, I was not able to do it in FreeBSD.
> 
> Never too late to learn....
> 
> I still think I have my (from 1982) 8" disks around with a ported CP/M system to a TRS-80 like system... But ever since the Intel ASM/CPM developement stack died on the University they have been lying round for nostalgic reasons. And the hardware got dumped with the last move about 12 years ago.
> 
> But it never ever occured to me that FreeBSD would be able to do 8", if alone for the controller. But now I learn that it could have worked...
> Cool :)

IIRC (it has been a while), the interfaces (h/w and protocol) to 8” drives varied somewhat by manufacturer. And yes, I do have at least one drive, blank media and an alignment disk in the archive.

> --WjW
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--
Bob Bishop
rb at gid.co.uk