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

[Brooke Gravitt]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 11:00 AM, Nate <nate at portents.com> wrote:

>
> 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
>

I'd say that the floppy drives still work well with the drivers under MacOS
8 or 9.  I understand getting the maximum out of the beige hardware, but
they were never supported under OS X anyway. Complaining that the OS you
shoehorned onto an unsupported platform doesn't support hardware that was
never on a supported platform for the OS sounds silly to me.

At at this point, what are you using floppies for, anyway? Make disk images
of the ancient software/backups from floppies from OS 9. You can read &
write to those images just fine, and copy them across the LAN. Plus, the
drives are gonna croak at some point anyway - do you really want to be
shuttling data around on floppy disk?