
speechless...
I can't believe he ruined an official IBM reference disk for this project. What's he going to do if he NEEDS that disk one day to boot his 386? He'll be sorry then, he will.
The pictures say it all, really. Hardware hacker Charles Mangin this weekend posted the results of his attempt to slot the innards from a USB Flash drive into an old 3.5in floppy disk case - well, two of them, to be precise, the original casing not being quite thick enough for the cable and connector. Charles Mangin Floppy …
The P70 was a really nice portable^Wluggable computer. I bought a rucksack just the right size so I could carry it on my motorbike. Another advantage of the P70 (being an IBM machine), was that it was the first portable supported by OS/2 right back from version 1.0 (with none of this GUI nonsense) . Some versions of OS/2 eventually them came on as many as 20 or 30 floppies.
It should be noted that I love these stories. I think it tickles the techie in all of us.
It would have scored higher though, if:
- it had been a single media
- it actually outwardly worked and appeared as a floppy drive (drive and media)
- it booted OS2/Warp or NeXT or something equally bizzare
My core i7 system is about 10 months old (so not exactly ancient). I'm sure that 3.5" hole is a floppy drive, certainly I ended up at an A> prompt the other day when I shoved a DOS boot disk in it.
(OK, this being a system I built myself is something of an exception. My previous PC even had a 5.25" drive since it took less room installed in the case than stored in the parts drawer).
I mean really - why? Of all the things he could possibly have done that day - that was the best thing he could do?
It's not even a single disk! I've got a tiny little USB flash drive that would easily fit inside a single floppy casing. If I were to take a disk apart and glue it in could I get published all the internet too?
When I saw the title I thought he'd found a way to do it and interface with a floppy controller so it was actually readable when you put it into a drive. My first thought was that'd be a) cool but b) pointless. Instead it turned out that it's just b) pointless.
If he wanted to put a thing inside another thing there's plenty of more fun ways to achieve that, if you get my drift....
fitting flash memory inside a 3.5 floppy was done well over 10 years ago with the flashpath from smartdisk
it used to take a smartmedia card and was identical in size / shape to a 3.5 floppy. it used to transfer its data using a magnetic head inside the disk to communicate with the head inside the floppy drive
attempting to walk -- and walk before trying to run.
I'm sure the esteemed commentards above, slagging off a perfectly good attempt of combining old tech with new tech, immediately jumped to the challenge and created what they professed was an even better idea.
And of course they all managed to do so, but forgot to send in the pictures of their successful attempts.
Ah well... I for one welcome the floppy-disk-combining-with-usb-sticks overlords.
I have an even better idea. It's a USB Flash drive that looks exactly like a USB Flash drive. I can't claim credit for this, I bought it like this, but someone has somehow managed to get a USB Flash drive to fit inside a USB Flash drive. Not only does it look neat, but it also has all the size advantages and memory capacity of a USB Flash drive! Perfect!
Another better idea; use sellotape to stick a USB Flash drive onto the middle page of a foolscap accountancy ledger. Hey, kewl!! It's like 21st century technology married with 19th century!! It's totally pointless and impractical! It looks like crap! More junk that you'll never, ever, use to fill up your desk drawer with!
I work in a school and so far I've found a couple of 1GB flash drives left in classrooms after someone's snapped the USB plug off while plugged in to a computer. So I gutted them, soldered short USB cables cut from dead keyboards to the pads left by the snapped-off connectors, and glued them into SD card cases. I use one of them quite frequently as it's got a bootable image of UBCD on it.
I own a couple of Microchannel PS/2s as well (a 286 and a 486) and I wouldn't hack up the reference diskettes either. You can download images and make copies but the original disk holds more retro value.
Oh, mine's the one with the MCA-16 10Base2 Ethernet adapter in the inside pocket.