44 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
44 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
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title: "Floppies"
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date: 2024-04-25T21:21:30+02:00
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---
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 Floppy reader positioned on my 2
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year old custom-built PC. What an occurrence! The old meets the new hahah
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A youngster like me could hardly appreciate the simplicity behind these things,
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let alone the struggle elders had to go through to work with such technology. I
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was searching for a male aux to male aux connector the other day and stumbled
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on this reader with a stack of floppies nearby. The mounting process was
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unsurprisingly easy since I am running Linux. I have no idea what is the case
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with Windows, and franky, I do not care at this point in time. I rush to my
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computer in all awe, excited to see what obscure and ancient data these might
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have in them or how they even work. Most had MS DOS executables and Batch
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installation scripts for some kind of software as well as some XLS tables and
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other uninteresting data.
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The mounting process had a peculiarity though.. I had to mount the whole disk
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and not just a partition whose file-system has been recognized by the kernel
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(`mount /dev/sda /mnt` instead of `mount /dev/sda1 /mnt`). Is that weird? I do
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not know..
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After minutes of staring at these boring files and finding nothing that would
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suffice my interest.. I have decided to format one of the floppies with an ext4
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file-system and make it my personal mini space. It is not like I can fit 4K
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images in here, but a couple of text files will suffice.
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 Here I collected all
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diskettes with English shortnotes
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An interesting feature of floppies is that you can forcibly restrict the
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reader's head from writing to the disc by flicking a tiny switch on the bottom
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right side of the plastic cover. Not all floppies have that switch though.
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One thing I learned from researching floppies is their design mechanism. From
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what I read, they work magnetically just like modern hard disks and beneath the
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plastic is located the actual disc where the data is stored. When you insert
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the floppy into the reader, it flicks the metal shield, exposing the internal
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disc (black rectangle), attaches to it a read/write head and there it operates
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according to the system's commands (reading/writing the data while the disc
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spins around).
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