Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 3rd Apr 2009 16:16 UTC, submitted by google_ninja
Remember, back in the day, before USB drives became common place, you had to use those weird square disks? We called them floppies, and they had about as much storage capacity as my current computer has in its power switch alone. One of the problems with floppy drives was that it was impossible to determine whether there was a floppy in the drive without actually spinning up the drive. Windows 95 almost had a feature that could detect whether or not there was a floppy in the drive without spinning it up.
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Member since:
2005-07-11
This is something that I never understood. All the way back to the 360 KB 5.25" floppy diskette (disks are inside the computer, not portable, diskette were portable), you had a friggin' hardware knob that you couldn't turn unless a diskette was in the drive. How hard would it have been to enable an interrupt on that knob to initiate a "scan diskette" operation? Even with the move to 3.5" diskettes, you still had to physically insert the diskette until it clicked. How hard could it have been to enable a "if this piece of hardware clicks, then scan the diskette" interrupt?
It boggles the mind that something so simple took until the advent of the CD-ROM (when the drive closes, scan the drive). [shakes head in wonder]