![]() As an example, the Tektronix 3000 series oscilloscopes came equipped with floppy drives, and that was by far the most common reason (like many times more often than any other reason) for repair on the things. ![]() The disks are easily damaged, susceptible to contamination from dust, they wear out quickly the same goes for the drives. Floppies aren't reliable and they never were. But when it comes to mission-critical hardware that literally controls a potential nuclear holocaust, “tried and true” carries more weight than “new and improved.” The cutting edge of technology is fine for your smartphone or a video game console. The first step in recovering data from such a disk will probably be to find out what system (which machine, which OS, which drive model) originally wrote that disk, then checking what hardware options are available.>The key word here is reliability - and that’s likely the reason floppy disks are still being used in medical equipment, ATMs, and aviation hardware as Tom mentioned. Different magnetic (coercivity) grades also could sometimes give you surprises. To make things worse, there were actually incompatible media types: Soft sectored, and various hard sectored styles. This is not a problem at filesystem or file format level that can be solved in software - different drive systems encoded data on the disks in a different way. Common example: Apple II or C64 5 1/4 inch disks, even if the physical disk used is the same, a standard 5 1/4 inch PC drive on a standard PC controller would be completely unable to read them. Incompatible as in, the wrong drive model and/or the wrong controller card will be unable to read a given floppy disk. Be aware that there were several incompatible formats around when 5 1/4 and 8 inch floppy disks were in use - see.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |