You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments View context
20 points

And why the floppy drive’s ribbon cable has a little twist in it??

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

Now I’m curious, why *does *the floppy drives cable have a little twist in it?

permalink
report
parent
reply
29 points

It’s kind of an elegant hack IBM did to make floppy drives easier to bother with.

Floppy drives were designed to attach to the computer in a bus topology, sharing all of their data connections. The only wires that weren’t in common were the Motor Enable and Drive Select lines, which is how the computer would tell the drives which one it wanted to talk to. This meant the drive needed to know which drive it was, so there were jumpers on the back so you could set them up as Drive 0 or 1 (which would show up in DOS as A or B). By twisting seven cables (three of which were ground and weren’t effected) and jumpering all drives as Drive 1(B), drives attached before the twist would respond as drive B and after the twist as drive A. That way you didn’t need to fuck with the jumpers. Some later drives even did away with the jumpers and hard wired them as B.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Thnx for this exposition!

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

I’m not 100% sure off the top of my head, but the end result is that the drive is set to A: rather than B: in Windows. Something to do with the pins on the motherboard specifying the drive order.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

You are correct. Later drives sometimes had a cable select dip switch/pin or different ports on the motherboard.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Technology

!technology@lemmy.world

Create post

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


Community stats

  • 15K

    Monthly active users

  • 6.8K

    Posts

  • 154K

    Comments