| Walt Mankowski via plug on 17 Dec 2025 08:52:52 -0800 |
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| Re: [PLUG] Floppy Drive |
When Chad asked the question, one potential issue I thought of was that the drivers might still be 32 bits instead of 64 bits. Glad to hear it's not the case! This just bite me for an old HP printer I have. The printer itself is fine, but HP is refusing to update the drivers. OK, so the printer is close to 20 years old. I still might need to buy more toner for it! Walt On Tue, Dec 16, 2025 at 05:43:36PM -0500, JP Vossen via plug wrote: > I just plugged an ancient Sony USB floppy drive (PCGA-UFD5) into my Mint-21.3 desktop and it auto-mounted and Just Worked. The hardest part was finding the right size box to sit it on so the USB pigtail could reach a port without the unit hanging in the air. > > I still have the Zenith 181 laptop I took to college in 1988. 8088 CPU, blue LCD screen, dual 720K 3.5" floppies, no hard drive, and 300 baud modem. It worked last time I powered it up. I've rebuilt the battery pack at least once, it's just a bunch of C cells soldered together and shrink-wrapped. > > That was superseded by a BSR 386SX/16 that I also still have, but haven't tried to power on since the mid-late 1990's probably. It was originally DOS but I converted it to Linux. I'm pretty sure I had Slackware 1 or 2 from Walnut Creek or InfoMagic CDs on it around 1993 or maybe 1994. I can't find a Walnut Creek set at a quick glance, but I have August 1995 and December 1996 InfoMagic 4 and 6 CD sets. > > The 1995 InfoMagic CD2 includes "DOOM (the game) for LINUX," looks like from sunsite.unc.edu `/public/ftp/pub/Linux/games/doom/`. Wow. :-) > > > On 12/16/25 04:01 PM, Rich Mingin (PLUG) via plug wrote: > > Ooooh! I had a Toshiba Pro 360CDT way back when, I loved that awful > > little brick! Chips and Tech 65555 2D decelerator! Lots of good > > memories. > > > > On Tue, Dec 16, 2025 at 3:22 PM Chad Waters via plug > > <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote: > > > > > > > > > Hey, > > > > > > What's the status of floppy drive kernel modules these days? Can I just grab any USB FDD from Amazon? I found A LOT of 3.5 floppies at my Dad's house recently and want to see if there's anything worth savaging. > > > > > > Really cool finds among them: > > > Duke Nukem > > > Starflight (5.25 floppy) > > > > > > Next project: I have his first "laptop": a beast of a Toshiba Pro 430CDT (Pentium Intel Inside!). I'll try powering it up and see if I can do anything with it. > > Later, > JP > -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- > JP Vossen, CISSP | http://www.jpsdomain.org/ | http://bashcookbook.com/ > ___________________________________________________________________________ > Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org > Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce > General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug