342
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
342 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59542 readers
3211 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Who will carry on the knowledge of what the a:\ and b:\ drives were?
And why the floppy drive's ribbon cable has a little twist in it??
Now I'm curious, why *does *the floppy drives cable have a little twist in it?
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.
Thnx for this exposition!
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.
You are correct. Later drives sometimes had a cable select dip switch/pin or different ports on the motherboard.
Right the jumpers would be cable select, master , slave generally. You could use master and slave or cs but shouldn't together. Not that you can't but screwing up your jumpers was the easy way to be pulling you hair out for failure to boot to the right drive or failure to id in the right order.