Indigo + floppy
===============

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...