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

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 07:04:24PM -0400, Robert Brooke Gravitt wrote:

>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.

That's a matter of opinion. They don't do what the old floppy drives
do. The old drives could read and write 400k and 800k drives and
since the data formatting was done by the CPU had much better error recovery.

The USB drives only work "fine" with high quality disks. The chances of
recovering data with one on a marginal or bad floppy are pretty poor.

At this point IMHO, the only real use the average user has for a 
floppy drive is to recover old data. You can buy a USB memory stick
for less than I bought floppies at one time.  Blank CD's cost pennies,
and are almost indestructable compared to floppies.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM