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idiotic floppy drives
Monday, June 7 1999
I'm perplexed by the behaviour of PC floppy drives. Even when there's no disk in them, any operating system call to the drive blissfully turns it on, gets the spindle motor up to speed, then sends the heads moving in search of media, complete with cranky stepper-motor noises. If the operating system would simply observe the state of the "disk present" switch, it could save itself a lot of wasted motion and branch around all that code where mechanical things are commanded to happen. The waste I resent in all this pointless motion isn't just reflected in the noises and delays while the missing media is being sought. Floppy drive access, it seems, is some sort of deeply primitive ritual. Whenever even the most advanced of PCs access the floppy drive, everything in the computer comes to a grinding halt and for a time we're back in 1982. Do you hear the faint trace of "Jesse's Girl" in that infuriating crankity crank? That's the sound of PCs before there was multitasking, before there were mice, back when the all-important floppy drive required (and could command) the attention and resources of an entire machine. Cut ahead 17 years. For some reason, this attention is still essential for the proper functioning of even the most modern computers. Personally, I think it reflects something profoundly rotten in practical modern engineering.
Today I was made acutely aware of the aforementioned computer engineering defect as I repeatedly tried to get the IDE drivers to function correctly in the PC I use for most of my work, including what you are now reading.
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