Comment on San Francisco to pay $212 million to end reliance on 5.25-inch floppy disks

FanciestPants@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I only teach my kids about /dev/fd0

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  • 0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Teach your kids to play music with cat /dev/fd0 >/dev/snd.

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    • jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Oh my god make it stop

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      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Ctrl + C

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• LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  And why the floppy drive’s ribbon cable has a little twist in it??

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  • Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Now I’m curious, why *does *the floppy drives cable have a little twist in it?

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    • captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It’s kind of an elegant hack IBM did to make floppy drives easier to bother with.

      Floppy drives were designed to attach to the computer in a bus topology, sharing all of their data connections. The only wires that weren’t in common were the Motor Enable and Drive Select lines, which is how the computer would tell the drives which one it wanted to talk to. This meant the drive needed to know which drive it was, so there were jumpers on the back so you could set them up as Drive 0 or 1 (which would show up in DOS as A or B). By twisting seven cables (three of which were ground and weren’t effected) and jumpering all drives as Drive 1(B), drives attached before the twist would respond as drive B and after the twist as drive A. That way you didn’t need to fuck with the jumpers. Some later drives even did away with the jumpers and hard wired them as B.

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      • Akasazh@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Thnx for this exposition!

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    • LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I’m not 100% sure off the top of my head, but the end result is that the drive is set to A: rather than B: in Windows. Something to do with the pins on the motherboard specifying the drive order.

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      • nucleative@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        You are correct. Later drives sometimes had a cable select dip switch/pin or different ports on the motherboard.

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• pastermil@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The CP/M gang, of course!

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