by mjg59 on 2/10/25, 7:27 PM
Despite the punchline, the USB floppy spec is actually incredibly restrictive and only supports 720K, 1.25MB and 1.44MB formatted capacities. This means, ironically for a spec partially written by a friend of Raymond Chen's, that you can't read the Microsoft 1.68MB DMF floppies used for software distribution with a USB floppy, but it also means that it's impossible to support the older 400K and 800K Mac formats. To be fair, those formats also require a special drive mechanism (the disk spins at different rates depending on which track you're reading), but there's no way to expose them within the USB floppy spec. There's an entirely justifiable argument for manufacturing a separate Mac drive with different functionality and requiring its own drivers.
(Edit to fix capacity)
by Lammy on 2/10/25, 6:33 PM
I do love having a full complement of matching translucent blue accessories (SuperDisk, PD/DVD-RAM drive, FireWire webcam shaped kinda like Orbb from QuakeⅢ with a human-foot-shaped metal stand, etc) to use with my “Blue & White” G3 tower (PowerMac1,1), so it worked on me! :)
Nine 2004-era comments now purged from Microsoft's current site: https://web.archive.org/web/20210125145431/http://bytepointe...
by bluedino on 2/10/25, 9:40 PM
I worked at Best Buy in those days. EVERYTHING was translucent.
But there were some problems. The accessory companies didn't match that Mac Bondi Blue very well. And they didn't match Blueberry, Lime, or Tangerine well either. So you'd have some weird color blue on your mouse, or gamepad, or external hard drive that didn't match up with your iMac.
I seem to remember some of the "official" accessories being able to use the right colors, but back then it was such a free for all.
by don-code on 2/10/25, 6:57 PM
I once ended up being the beneficiary of Crucial making a gambit on "Mac memory", which was standard DDR memory with a different label on it. The SPD literally showed it as a different, non-Mac-specific SKU. Luckily, few people fell for this, and Crucial later unloaded the "Mac memory" at a discount relative to standard DDR memory.
by cbm-vic-20 on 2/10/25, 7:38 PM
As a retro-enthusiast, I've always been dismayed that nobody ever made a USB 5¼" floppy drive. I know there are things like Greaseweazel that read the magnetic flux on the disc, but I just want to read and write PC formatted floppies without all the hackiness. I don't know how good GW is as a plug-and-play solution.
by ivraatiems on 2/10/25, 10:23 PM
To this day, lots of cheap and universal accessories - mice, keyboards, optical drives, what have you - come with silly little "compatible with Windows!" stickers.
It's sort of a user-facing cargo cult for computing; we have supplied the compatibility incantations, therefore, we shall support your compatible system! If you use a non-compatible system, we shall not help you: this is an offense to the gods.
by snvzz on 2/14/25, 3:56 AM
Greaseweazle + any old standard floppy drive (3.5"/5.25"/8") is the way to go, for having a usb attached floppy drive.
Avoid usb fdds, they are burdened with a controller that do not allow track read/write, making them of very limited usefulness.
by rezmason on 2/10/25, 7:29 PM
My college campus store sold colorful translucent floppy disks as recently as 2009. They felt anachronistic.
by fitsumbelay on 2/10/25, 8:24 PM
I've got a USB floppy drive from maybe nearly 20 years ago that copied the iMac translucent look but I'm pretty sure I bought it from a tech vendor where I also bought RAM and zip disks ('memba them?) in bulk and not from Home Shopping Network ...
by jmclnx on 2/10/25, 6:30 PM
Funny, nice short read. I won't spoil it for people.