Yahoo! News Story - Floppy Disk Becoming Relic of the Past (fwd)

[Fred N. van Kempen]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, John Foust wrote:

> I recently tried a Belkin USB-to-serial and a second brand (Amb-something)
> on my Win2000 box in hopes of delivering an extra serial port for
> my old Palm III.  No go!  Both blue-screened when Palm Desktop
> tried to access the serial port.  I suspect that either my motherboard
> USB is blown or the drivers didn't like a dual-processor machine.
Most cheap-brand card drivers have not been tested with SMP
systems, and, often, will blow up on said systems.  I have
serial, parallel, ISDN, Ethernet and WiFi USB thingies, and
they all work fine on my (Win2K) laptop.

> There are PCMCIA to serial adapters, no?  And we'll be able to
> insert PCI serial cards as long as PCI is around.
Yup.

> But I'd love to have a USB-to-floppy connection, too.  And we'd all
> love it if it was 8", 5 1/4", 3 1/2" and 2" compatible.  :-)
I have one of those.  Well, two actually.. one is a regular
USB floppy thinger that came with the lappy (Compaq Armada)
and another one which is larger, but seems to be featuring
a regular floppy interface connector on the inside, so it
*should* be possible to operate that with non-3.5" drives
with some mods..

--f