[rescue] Parallel ports [was Re: Slightly OT: ?Bad Cap Saga]

[Nate]

On Aug 21, 2008, at 7:04 PM, Robert Brooke Gravitt wrote:

> On Aug 21, 2008, at 1:46 PM, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 11:40:44AM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
>>> I still use floppy disks on OS X 10.5.4 with the drivers built  
>>> into the
>>> operating system.
>>
>> Internal or USB? USB floppy drives use very different drivers than  
>> internal
>> ones.
>>
>
> What's your point? As Jonathon said, you can still use floppies,  
> today, on OS X 10.5, with built-in drivers. And the external drives  
> read and write to floppies just fine.

Let's say you're me, someone who supports his father's small non- 
profit company when he can, and set them up with Macs for free by  
scrounging up old 7300-7600 and platinum G3 class machines,  
installing G3 upgrades in systems that don't have one, flashed Radeon  
7000 32MB PCI cards, ATTO UltraWide SCSI cards, and 512-1024MB of RAM  
in each, and using XPostFacto to have them boot and run OS X 10.4.   
Now these machines have an internal floppy drive, but don't come with  
USB.  So now, because there's no OS X floppy driver for internal  
floppies (even though platinum G3 Macs shipped with internal floppy  
drives and early versions of OS X officially supported those Macs),  
it means those internal floppy drives are less than useless - you pop  
a disk in, you'll need a paperclip to get it out again!

- Nate