Open-then-Save-As is *not* the same as copying a file!
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@blakeyrat said:
I never thought I'd actually see anyone actually try to defend this. Put Away is very different to me than Throw Away, which is what the trash can metaphor is. How is that consistent?Dragging the disk to the trash was made a shortcut to Put Away because if you're planning to throw the disk away, you're also in "stop using this disk" mode. It's not like the OS is going to waste its time scrambling the contents of the disk specifically to make it trash, it just spits the disk back out.
It's an example of how an OS can strictly follow its own metaphor (in this case, disks are "objects" on the "desktop") and still end up confusing.
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@boomzilla said:
I never thought I'd actually see anyone actually try to defend this. Put Away is very different to me than Throw Away, which is what the trash can metaphor is. How is that consistent?
From the computer's point of view, there's no difference between "I'm going to put this disk away in a drawer" and "I'm going to throw this disk in the trash."
I mean, what would you expect the computer to do if you tell it "I'm going to throw this disk in the trash"? (Edit: I guess nowadays, for security reasons, you might expect the computer to scramble the disk somehow... but we're talking about a 1984 interface, not a 2010 one.)
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@blakeyrat said:
I mean, what would you expect the computer to do if you tell it "I'm going to throw this disk in the trash"?
Shed a tear? She is made of metal but she is not insensitive, you hand bigot
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@blakeyrat said:
From the computer's point of view, there's no difference between "I'm going to put this disk away in a drawer" and "I'm going to throw this disk in the trash."
OK, as long as the computer is the one using the interface, then...WTF?
@blakeyrat said:
I mean, what would you expect the computer to do if you tell it "I'm going to throw this disk in the trash"? (Edit: I guess nowadays, for security reasons, you might expect the computer to scramble the disk somehow... but we're talking about a 1984 interface, not a 2010 one.)
Well, I'd expect something similar to dragging something else to trash. Whether it overwrites the file, or simply unlinks it in the FS or whatever. You could drag other things to the trash, right? What happened to them? Sorry, but the year of the interface does not excuse something like this.
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@boomzilla said:
Well, I'd expect something similar to dragging something else to trash. Whether it overwrites the file, or simply unlinks it in the FS or whatever. You could drag other things to the trash, right? What happened to them?
Meaning, you think it should copy the entire contents of the disk to the Trash folder? Saving it until the user empties it later on?
Do you think it's worth forcing the user to wait the 4-5 minutes that would take even knowing they are just going to throw the disk away anyway? What if the computer doesn't have a hard drive to store the contents of the disk in the first place?
@boomzilla said:
Sorry, but the year of the interface does not excuse something like this.
I don't see it as needing an "excuse." It's not a bad interface.
The only confusion is:
1) People not understanding the difference between Eject and Put Away, which are different commands which do different things (something clearly spelled-out by all the documentation and tutorials that shipped on those early Macs)
2) So-called "experts" teaching people to use "drag to trashcan" as a shortcut for Put Away. (Some of those so-called experts didn't even know the difference between Eject and Put Away themselves.)
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@blakeyrat said:
Meaning, you think it should copy the entire contents of the disk to the Trash folder? Saving it until the user empties it later on?
Well, that would be consistent, at least with their metaphor, as you brought up. Or keep it around at least until the disk is ejected. Or warn the user that it will actually be deleted, not put in the recycle bin? I dunno, but something to do with deleting / recycling.@blakeyrat said:
Do you think it's worth forcing the user to wait the 4-5 minutes that would take even knowing they are just going to throw the disk away anyway? What if the computer doesn't have a hard drive to store the contents of the disk in the first place?
At this point I think you're putting words into my mouth, and avoiding the issue at hand here, which is that the interface does something completely unintuitive.@blakeyrat said:
@boomzilla said:
Sorry, but the year of the interface does not excuse something like this.
I don't see it as needing an "excuse." It's not a bad interface.
OK...you were the one who said it was from 1984, not 2010, implying that there was something important about its age or something.@blakeyrat said:
The only confusion is:
1) People not understanding the difference between Eject and Put Away, which are different commands which do different things (something clearly spelled-out by all the documentation and tutorials that shipped on those early Macs)
2) So-called "experts" teaching people to use "drag to trashcan" as a shortcut for Put Away. (Some of those so-called experts didn't even know the difference between Eject and Put Away themselves.)WTF? What about the people who built the interface to make such a confusing thing possible?
Who are you, and what did you do with blakeyrat?
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@boomzilla said:
@blakeyrat said:
Meaning, you think it should copy the entire contents of the disk to the Trash folder? Saving it until the user empties it later on?
Well, that would be consistent, at least with their metaphor, as you brought up. Or keep it around at least until the disk is ejected. Or warn the user that it will actually be deleted, not put in the recycle bin? I dunno, but something to do with deleting / recycling.I could see showing a warning. But I also believe the behavior is consistent as-is, so.
@boomzilla said:
@blakeyrat said:
Do you think it's worth forcing the user to wait the 4-5 minutes that would take even knowing they are just going to throw the disk away anyway? What if the computer doesn't have a hard drive to store the contents of the disk in the first place?
At this point I think you're putting words into my mouth, and avoiding the issue at hand here, which is that the interface does something completely unintuitive.Ok; what is it doing that's completely unintuitive?
Look, I fully admit that *something* was wrong with the GUI, obviously, since people were using dragging a disk to the trash as a shortcut for Put Away. But I also think using it as an example of a bad UI is utterly ridiculous, since it had to be in the top 5% best of all UIs at the time it came out.
@boomzilla said:
@blakeyrat said:
The only confusion is:
1) People not understanding the difference between Eject and Put Away, which are different commands which do different things (something clearly spelled-out by all the documentation and tutorials that shipped on those early Macs)
2) So-called "experts" teaching people to use "drag to trashcan" as a shortcut for Put Away. (Some of those so-called experts didn't even know the difference between Eject and Put Away themselves.)WTF? What about the people who built the interface to make such a confusing thing possible?
Who are you, and what did you do with blakeyrat?
Cripes, are we playing Vague?
What is the "completely unintuitive" behavior you're alluding to? What's the confusing "thing" you're talking about? Use your words, please!
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@blakeyrat said:
What is the "completely unintuitive" behavior you're alluding to? What's the confusing "thing" you're talking about? Use your words, please!
Umm...what we've been going back and forth about...dragging a disk to a picture of a trash can, which is normally used to delete things (yeah, yeah, recycle bin, etc, etc, as far as the user's concerned, it's how you delete stuff), unless it's a disk, and then it doesn't delete anything, but it ejects the disk.
The rest of the UI might have been pure genius, but this particular bit of it makes no sense. Unless you try really hard to rationalize it, like you did.
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@boomzilla said:
Umm...what we've been going back and forth about...dragging a disk to a picture of a trash can, which is normally used to delete things (yeah, yeah, recycle bin, etc, etc, as far as the user's concerned, it's how you delete stuff), unless it's a disk, and then it doesn't delete anything, but it ejects the disk.
A disk is a physical object. The computer can't sprout a robotic arm and throw it in the trash can for you. The best the computer can do is eject the disk and forget everything it knew about it-- which is exactly what the computer does.
@boomzilla said:
The rest of the UI might have been pure genius, but this particular bit of it makes no sense. Unless you try really hard to rationalize it, like you did.
Well, you have to remember that I used Macs primarily from about 1988 to about 2002 or so. But it all makes perfect sense to me, without rationalization. (What you're call rationalization, I call pointing out the hurr durr obvious.)
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@blakeyrat said:
@boomzilla said:
Umm...what we've been going back and forth about...dragging a disk to a picture of a trash can, which is normally used to delete things (yeah, yeah, recycle bin, etc, etc, as far as the user's concerned, it's how you delete stuff), unless it's a disk, and then it doesn't delete anything, but it ejects the disk.
A disk is a physical object. The computer can't sprout a robotic arm and throw it in the trash can for you. The best the computer can do is eject the disk and forget everything it knew about it-- which is exactly what the computer does.
Except that you [i]don't[/i] want to throw it away. That's the whole point of contention. You don't want to trash it, forget about it, or otherwise remove it from sight or mind. In fact, it's more like "saving" (for later) than "putting away" (for later).
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@blakeyrat said:
A disk is a physical object. The computer can't sprout a robotic arm and throw it in the trash can for you.
I'm not putting it in the tash... I want to eject it. If I drag to trash, I'd expect the computer to delete the contents, exactly like binning the physical disk would "delete" the contents.
But deleting the contents would be problematic, as you say, and so I would have opted to make dragging to trash an impossible operation for drive icons. That would have made the most sense.
So you're saying that there was indeed an eject command called "Put Away" which nobody ever used because everybody used the shortcut to it, which is Drag To Trash which was never intended to be the main entry point for this task?
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@blakeyrat said:
A disk is a physical object. The computer can't sprout a robotic arm and throw it in the trash can for you. The best the computer can do is eject the disk and forget everything it knew about it-- which is exactly what the computer does.Well, you have to remember that I used Macs primarily from about 1988 to about 2002 or so. But it all makes perfect sense to me, without rationalization. (What you're call rationalization, I call pointing out the hurr durr obvious.)
Yes, you used them for so long, you don't even notice the rationalization any more. I get it. You completely skip over the "trash can -> delete stuff" part of the desktop metaphor. No, the computer can't disintegrate the physical disk. But it could easily delete the contents on the disk.
People can get used to all sorts of crappy UIs. We have to, given how many there are. And for all you rant about the awfulness of OS UIs (largely justifiably), it amazes me that you can defend this particular interface.
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@Xyro said:
Except that you don't want to throw it away. That's the whole point of contention. You don't want to trash it, forget about it, or otherwise remove it from sight or mind. In fact, it's more like "saving" (for later) than "putting away" (for later).
It does that as a side-effect, not as the main effect.
If you want to save the disk for later, you should select Put Away instead. Which performs the same action, but your intent is "I'm going to use this disk again" instead of "I'm done with this disk forever."
@dhromed said:
So you're saying that there was indeed an eject command called "Put Away" which nobody ever used because everybody used the shortcut to it, which is Drag To Trash which was never intended to be the main entry point for this task?
Eject and Put Away are different commands that do different things. For example if you select a file currently in the trash, and use Put Away, it goes back to whatever folder it was in before it was put in the trash. Same with the desktop, which was originally considered a temporary workspace and not someplace you'd want to permanently keep files.
@boomzilla said:
Yes, you used them for so long, you don't even notice the rationalization any more. I get it. You completely skip over the "trash can -> delete stuff" part of the desktop metaphor. No, the computer can't disintegrate the physical disk. But it could easily delete the contents on the disk.
It could format the disk, but why would it bother? It already knows you're just going to throw the damned thing in the trash anyway... there's no point spending any time doing anything with the disk (except ejecting it from the drive) when you drag it into the trash.
@boomzilla said:
People can get used to all sorts of crappy UIs. We have to, given how many there are. And for all you rant about the awfulness of OS UIs (largely justifiably), it amazes me that you can defend this particular interface.
I don't think I have anything to apologize for. Even if this particular metaphor didn't pan out, well, at least the behavior is consistent with the metaphor, at least it didn't require rote-memorization of file paths or complicated CLI commands, and at least it didn't get in the way of anything the user was doing.
In short, at least it was designed by people who cared about the user more than anything else and performed scientific testing to ensure its quality. 90% of software companies that write GUIs don't even do that now! Back in the 80s, Apple was the only one who did it at all.
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@blakeyrat said:
I don't think I have anything to apologize for. Even if this particular metaphor didn't pan out, well, at least the behavior is consistent with the metaphor, at least it didn't require rote-memorization of file paths or complicated CLI commands, and at least it didn't get in the way of anything the user was doing.
Well, I agree that it's pretty easy to use, once you know what it does, there is absolutely nothing consistent about the behavior. Sorry, but you've provided no reasonable explanation for consistency here. It does something completely fucking different. Imagine if you had a method that looked like:
void trash_can( object name, bool is_disk ) if is_disk then eject else put into recycling binSure, it works, and once you've figured out the parameters, you can use it correctly and easily, but you've also created a WTF. Seriously, if you had just seen the screen, and hadn't gone through "all of the tutorials" or the rest of the manual, and watched someone do this to a disk that had valuable information on it, you wouldn't be a little bit worried about what was about to happen?
@blakeyrat said:
In short, at least it was designed by people who cared about the user more than anything else and performed scientific testing to ensure its quality. 90% of software companies that write GUIs don't even do that now! Back in the 80s, Apple was the only one who did it at all.
I don't disagree that they cared about it. Just that they clearly didn't succeed here.
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@blakeyrat said:
@dtobias said:
Does anybody have any idea how I can possibly train non-techie office workers, who sometimes in the course of their jobs need to send files to me that need to be run through some program, imported into a database, etc., into giving me the file in the form in which it is originally received by them (e.g., comma-separated-values), unmangled by a trip through the digestive tract of some program that Windows chooses to open the file in (Excel, Notepad, etc.)?
Tell them to forward the email to you, or give you the FTP/whatever credentials instead of downloading it themselves. Don't rely on them to pass the files to you; get the files from the same source they do.
You've seriously never hit upon this solution?
@dtobias said:
25 years of point-and-drool operating systems seem to have thoroughly expunged any concept that people may have ever had to the effect that the proper way to give somebody a copy of a file is to actually copy the file, at the raw operating system level which does not involve slurping it into some application and then barfing it out again.
And I'm sure you're going to back-up your thesis here with evidence that this is due to "point-and-drool operating systems" any... second... now...
@dtobias said:
(from their web browser, email program, or however they received the file in the first place)
And you haven't solved this by getting access to the web browser, email, or however they received the file in the first place because...?
Those monkeys who stack crates to get at the bananas figure things out quicker than you. Alternate theory: your co-workers are fucking up the files on purpose because you're such an asshole.
Wow, I want to live in the same world that the mean man lives in, where IT is the dog and users are the tail.
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@boomzilla said:
void trash_can( object name, bool is_disk )
if is_disk then eject
else put into recycling binOk, if you're debating using PSUEDOCODE, you're thinking on the completely wrong level here. Christ.
The question isn't, "what did the function Apple wrote to handle the behavior look like?" Because that's an implementation detail, and frankly, who gives a fuck. The question is, "what should happen (if anything) when you drag the icon of a disk to the trash can?"
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@blakeyrat said:
Ok, if you're debating using PSUEDOCODE, you're thinking on the completely wrong level here. Christ.
The question isn't, "what did the function Apple wrote to handle the behavior look like?" Because that's an implementation detail, and frankly, who gives a fuck. The question is, "what should happen (if anything) when you drag the icon of a disk to the trash can?"
Sorry if my analogy was too hard for you to follow. I wasn't trying to replicate their code, but to show an analogous interface that employed the same WTF, hoping that you could see it if you (metaphorically) stepped away from the desktop. Code being a common thing around here, and the analogy between a method that does very different things, and a desktop icon that does different things being so apparently obvious, that I thought it might get through the haze of rationalizations.
I even explained it, and you still didn't get it.
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@blakeyrat said:
"what should happen (if anything) when you drag the icon of a disk to the trash can?"
Underage hookers should turn up with a bag full of drugs. The government should mistakenly print me some money.Come on, seriously. There's only one thing that makes any sense at all, and that's to delete the desktop shortcut.
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@DaveK said:
A non-techy friend of mind inadvertently stumbled across the gnu.org website's "humour" section the other day.
.... Ravioli code? Seriously? WTF?
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@intertravel said:
Come on, seriously. There's only one thing that makes any sense at all, and that's to delete the desktop shortcut.
what
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@blakeyrat said:
@boomzilla said:
This metaphor shouldn't have been necessary in the first place. It was driven by an immensely questionable hardware design decision. Namely: They didn't have any sort of eject button on the floppy drives. This was kind of merited because the standard mechanical eject button has some user-friendliness issues - namely you can eject the disk in the middle of a write cycle. But why not couple the electronic-eject mechanism to an electronic button, and have that button gracefully unmount the fucking thing? This same poor design decision carried through to early caddy-based CDROMs, which also lacked a button. When tray-loading CDROMs started shipping on Macs, which DID have buttons, the situation got worse. The buttons refused to do anything if the disk was mounted - instead of doing the sensible thing (which sane OSes do) and triggering an unmount and then ejecting. Same shit for zip disks and other removable media whose hardware wasn't designed by morons. If they'd taken the sensible approach, they wouldn't have needed the disk=>trash or 'put away' metaphors AT ALL. (well, for network mounts, but those should have been handled differently as well)void trash_can( object name, bool is_disk ) if is_disk then eject else put into recycling bin
Ok, if you're debating using PSUEDOCODE, you're thinking on the completely wrong level here. Christ.
The question isn't, "what did the function Apple wrote to handle the behavior look like?" Because that's an implementation detail, and frankly, who gives a fuck. The question is, "what should happen (if anything) when you drag the icon of a disk to the trash can?"
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@blakeyrat said:
I mean, what would you expect the computer to do if you tell it "I'm going to throw this disk in the trash"? (Edit: I guess nowadays, for security reasons, you might expect the computer to scramble the disk somehow... but we're talking about a 1984 interface, not a 2010 one.)
So... you're kinda relying on the user to have pre-existing experience and meta-knowledge, and in that case you think it's intuitively obvious what will happen, yeh?
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@blakeyrat said:
The question is, "what should happen (if anything) when you drag the icon of a disk to the trash can?"
Nothing should happen.
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This may sound weird, and I can't really explain why, but for me dragging the disk/CD-ROM icon to the trash to eject it (which I now know wasn't the technical term for what it was doing) somehow made sense to me. Now to be fair it didn't make a lot of sense, and chances are it was more post-hoc rationalization then anything.
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I don't have any first-hand experience with classic MacOS, but I remember thinking "WTF - is he trying to format my drive?!" when I brought some documents to a print shop, and saw the guy drag my USB pendrive icon to trash after he copied the files off...
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@ender said:
I don't have any first-hand experience with classic MacOS, but I remember thinking "WTF - is he trying to format my drive?!" when I brought some documents to a print shop, and saw the guy drag my USB pendrive icon to trash after he copied the files off...
I'm going to declare (by which I mean make up condescending bullshit that backs up my point of view) that you all just have a problem because you've been brainwashed by crappy Windows interfaces for too long, and you've never experienced the true joy of Classic MacOS. The OS where the "are you sure you want to save before quitting" dialog causes sudden euphoria whenever it appears, and where the TCP/IP configuration dialog single-handedly brought peace in the middle east! (Look what happens when OS X comes out: unrest and war.)
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@blakeyrat said:
and where the TCP/IP configuration dialog single-handedly brought peace in the middle east! (Look what happens when OS X comes out: unrest and war.)
Classic had a standard TCP/IP configuration panel? The only one I ever had was fairly shite. Wouldn't let you set alternate DNS servers, even. Just primary.And IIRC, it wasn't even dedicated to TCP/IP - it was integrated into the PPP settings.
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@Weng said:
@blakeyrat said:
and where the TCP/IP configuration dialog single-handedly brought peace in the middle east! (Look what happens when OS X comes out: unrest and war.)
Classic had a standard TCP/IP configuration panel? The only one I ever had was fairly shite. Wouldn't let you set alternate DNS servers, even. Just primary.And IIRC, it wasn't even dedicated to TCP/IP - it was integrated into the PPP settings.This is the configuration panel for the original TCP/IP stack, MacTCP:
Draw your own conclusions.
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@Weng said:
@blakeyrat said:
and where the TCP/IP configuration dialog single-handedly brought peace in the middle east! (Look what happens when OS X comes out: unrest and war.)
I ARE ROBOT FROM MARS TRAVELING TO YOUR PLANET ON TEMPORARY TOURISM VISA.
PLEASE TO EXPLAIN TO ME HUMAN CONCEPT KNOWN AS HUMOR.
ABOVE STATEMENT MEANT LITERALLY Y/N!?FTFY. You humorless fuck.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
This is the configuration panel for the original TCP/IP stack, MacTCP:
That's not nearly as bad as whaat I remember.
Draw your own conclusions.
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@Scarlet Manuka said:
One thing that I always liked about the Mac Classic OS was that it could distinguish between different floppies using the same floppy drive. Made working with floppies much easier on systems with a single floppy drive. I never really understood why we couldn't have gotten that feature in Windows, sometime before the floppy drive receded into obsolescence.
For those who never used it: when you inserted a floppy you got an icon representing that disk, labelled with the disk's volume label. When you were finished with the disk you dragged this icon to the Trash. There was also an Eject command if you hadn't finished with the disk but needed to use the drive for another disk. When you did this the disk's icon would be greyed out but you could still see and work with the disk's folder structure and files. So if you wanted to copy a file from one disk to another, you'd put the second disk in, eject it, put the first disk in, and drag the file to the second disk; it'd read the file, prompt you to swap disks, wait until you put the correct floppy in, then write the file. Of course, if you already had both disks showing in the system you just had to drag the file, and it would prompt you to change disks as needed.Wouldn't work. PC floppy drives did not have disk insert notification (so the OS was not aware that the disk had changed without reading the drive). This means that the OS had no ability to sit and wait for a disk change, it either had to loudly read the drive every few seconds, or wait for you - the user - to invoke some action that caused a disk read. On a Mac however, the floppy drive notified the OS that a disk had changed, and so Mac OS could just sit and wait.
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@Kyanar said:
Wouldn't work. PC floppy drives did not have disk insert notification (so the OS was not aware that the disk had changed without reading the drive). This means that the OS had no ability to sit and wait for a disk change, it either had to loudly read the drive every few seconds, or wait for you - the user - to invoke some action that caused a disk read. On a Mac however, the floppy drive notified the OS that a disk had changed, and so Mac OS could just sit and wait.
Incorrect. They only lack the automatic eject function - pin 34 on a standard floppy drive is usable as a disk detect. It's just that nobody ever bothered to use it for that - all drives support it, all the controllers support it, but no mainstream PC OS bothers (probably because one specific, galactically ancient 5.25" drive did it wrong, and just ignoring the detection line was easier than figuring out what specific floppy drive is connected. Once the floppy driver was written, why the hell would you ever bother to rewrite it?).In fact, some clones used standard drives - and an unpopulated standard floppy header is present on the first-party beige G3 motherboards. There are Damned Fools out there who modified their G3s to use real floppy drives after they cooked the expensive, hard-to-find Crapple ones. The procedure? Solder on a header and flip a jumper. This is because Apple's 'proprietary' floppy cable is just a standard one with the Drive 2 pins lopped off and an extra signal line to trigger the eject motor.
Apple was clearly gearing up to marginalize the floppy drive and use less expensive parts. Instead, they just omitted the floppy drive altogether from the blue & white G3s and iMacs.
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A good example of the "Not Invented Here" syndrome
@blakeyrat said:
The question is, "what should happen (if anything) when you drag the icon of a disk to the trash can?"
No, the question is "Why are you doing something that makes no sense?" Dragging something to the Trash Can (or Recycle Bin in Windows) implies that you want to get rid of it. In real life you don't throw something into a trash can in order to save it for later. If you're going to use the Trash Can metaphor then you should have it make sense. If you drag a file to the Trash Can then the file should be deleted. If you drag an icon to the Trash Can or Recycle Bin, the only sensible action is to delete the icon, since obviously you don't want to (and can't) "delete" a disk.. As someone else has pointed out, all of this nonsense is the result of the incredibly stupid design decision of not having an eject button on the floppy drive. Somehow, for the past 25 years or so, every computer not made by Apple has had a floppy drive with an eject button and nobody has ever seemed to have a problem with it.
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@El_Heffe said:
Somehow, for the past 25 years or so, every computer not made by Apple has had a floppy drive with an eject button
Sun Sparcstations used the same floppy drive as Apple. I suspect all the various other 'alternative' architectures also used it.
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@El_Heffe said:
As someone else has pointed out, all of this nonsense is the result of the incredibly stupid design decision of not having an eject button on the floppy drive.
On my Mac LC at least1 (and at least one all-in-one model), the floppy drive had an eject button inside, which you could work by inserting a flat object into the drive slot. This was more obvious to people than the manual eject FKEYs (cmd-shift-1 and cmd-shift-2, one for each floppy drive) used to actuate the eject motor even when the Mac didn't think a disc was present.
@El_Heffe said:
Somehow, for the past 25 years or so, every computer not made by Apple has had a floppy drive with an eject button and nobody has ever seemed to have a problem with it.
Maybe, but one thing I noticed with Linux is that it locks (or at least locked, this was around 2000) the eject button of a drive containing a mounted medium, such as a CD-ROM or Zip disc, exactly like Apple did. At least you had umount with Linux – Windows NT 4 would happily let you eject a Zip disc without caring that the write cashe wasn't flushed to disc. Only in the final throes of logout were you warned that your data was lost. Apple and Linux gave you the assurance that when you disc came out, your data was safely stowed on it.
1 I am glad someone pointed out that the Mac LC did not have soft power, as claimed by the recent front page article. Mine did come with the keyboard shown in the photo with the the soft power button, which was as effective as goggles, and I was overjoyed when I got a different Mac (a IIvx) where that button worked and I could finally turn on the machine via the keyboard.
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@Weng said:
It's just that nobody ever bothered to use it for that - all drives support it, all the controllers support it, but no mainstream PC OS bothers (probably because one specific, galactically ancient 5.25" drive did it wrong, and just ignoring the detection line was easier than figuring out what specific floppy drive is connected. Once the floppy driver was written, why the hell would you ever bother to rewrite it?).
Windows 95 apparently [url=http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/04/02/9528175.aspx]almost[/url] had that feature - but too many drives got it wrong.
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@ender said:
@Weng said:
Yet another software feature governed by horrible or nonexistant hardware specs.It's just that nobody ever bothered to use it for that - all drives support it, all the controllers support it, but no mainstream PC OS bothers (probably because one specific, galactically ancient 5.25" drive did it wrong, and just ignoring the detection line was easier than figuring out what specific floppy drive is connected. Once the floppy driver was written, why the hell would you ever bother to rewrite it?).
Windows 95 apparently almost had that feature - but too many drives got it wrong.
