One of the important technologies of early (and is some countries also
late) 1990s was the 3.5" floppy drive. It was a technology from second
half of 1980s. For me it was the only way to move data between
computers for very long time (I ceased to use it as a main media for
file transfer somewhat between 2003 and 2005). I even made my slides
for lectures with use of the LaTeX and the XFig because vector images
(EPS files produced by the XFig) were very small and the final document
produced by the LaTeX was small, too. Each of my presentations from
that time (1999-2005) was under 1.4 MB just because I needed to put in
on a floppy disk (I had a ZIP drive from 2004, too but I still wanted
to hae small files - just for the case).
For a short period I had a working floppy drive in my SGI Indigo2. Then
I sold this machine (a complete, tuned and working one with a CD-ROM, a
floptical, the R4400SC/250 CPU and the SolidIMPACT graphics) for
reasons I cannot understand today. From that time I never had a working
floppy in any of my SGIs (they require a SCSI one, ideally a TEAC
device). I actually have 4 or 5 such drives but no one works.
Some years ago I have bought a SGI Indigo "option drive" floopy on a
sled. I didn't worked so I put is to storage. This year I carefully
disassembled it and found that some cables are not correctly plugged in
and that some connector pins are bent. I corrected all of these issues
and plugged the drive into my Indigo. It worked until I inserted the
actual diskette. Then it have became clear that the device don't work
(it refuses to read any media).
Thus I decided to search the eBay to find another one. And I have found
one. It is not ideal (the SGI drives don't have the eject button) but
it works. The eject button makes impossible to use SGI's front plate.
This is both visual and functional issue. The SGI front plate is bigger
so use of a smaller one leaves holes in the front of computer. More
importantly, one of the holes is just about as big as the slot for
inserting of media is. So I several times inserted the media to this
hole (it is hard to get such media back without removing the whole
drive with its sled, by the way). The existence of the button means
that ability to eject the media by a computer command is not available.
So it is not possible to "eject" it with the "eject" command. I have to
unmount the drive and the remove it by pressing the hardware button as
soon as possible (before the IRIX media daemon recognises and mounts
the media again).
Thus this solution is not ideal but it works. It can read DOS floppies
(I don't think that the IRIX understands Apple formats), it can format
them and it can put files on them. It can deal with DOS filenames (it
the name exceeds 8.3 size it defiantly refuses to copy them to floppy -
it has an error dialog for this purpose). And then I can read such
floppy disk on my ppc64le Linux workstation (with use of the USB floppy
drive).
Well, I still like these floppies for some reason...
