Floppy disk drive works with Win 10 Pro, won't book if disk in drive

LMiller7 said:

I too found the behavior with booting from floppy disks odd when i first discovered it 20+ years ago.
Any normally formatted floppy disk is designed to boot to 16 bit real mode DOS. The BIOS will recognize the disk as bootable and attempt to follow the instructions in the disks boot block. Of course in more recent times floppy disks don't usually contain the DOS files so the boot process will fail.

In the early days when floppy disks were the primary mass storage this behavior was convenient. I suppose this behavior was maintained for compatibility reasons.

And in the really early days, PCs had only floppy disks, A: and B: :) No I really don't miss those days one bit. Especially the original 5 1/4" SS SD floppy disks at about 125 KB. Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.

Lance1 said:

Can you imagine installing let's say Window 7 64 bit using 1.44 MB floppies! How many would it take to do the job?

- - - Updated - - -

My apologies. I kind of went off-topic.

Even more off topic I remember using 8" floppy drives in the 1970s (about 0.5 MB capacity?) On a DEC PDP 11/34 I also used RL01/02 removable having huge 5-10MB capacity. Processor memory was very limited requiring programming to use overlays to specify what routines were held in memory. Around 1980 I was doing image processing research. A single 256kb frame store cost £30k then and occupied a full 19" equipment rack!

I still have my stack of 3.5" installation floppy drives for Windows 95 and later variants.

Steve C said:

Even more off topic I remember using 8" floppy drives in the 1970s (about 0.5 MB capacity?) On a DEC PDP 11/34 I also used RL01/02 removable having huge 5-10MB capacity. Processor memory was very limited requiring programming to use overlays to specify what routines were held in memory. Around 1980 I was doing image processing research. A single 256kb frame store cost £30k then and occupied a full 19" equipment rack!

I still have my stack of 3.5" installation floppy drives for Windows 95 and later variants.

WOW! You are a pioneer and many have set a footprint for us today.

Lance1 said:

WOW! You are a pioneer and many have set a footprint for us today.

I am now a pensioner but programmed my first computer at school age 15. I had to program (Algol) using paper tape in a teleprinter which communicated via phone line to the mainframe computer at the local council.

Steve C said:

I am now a pensioner but programmed my first computer at school age 15. I had to program (Algol) using paper tape in a teleprinter which communicated via phone line to the mainframe computer at the local council.

At age 15! You are a pioneer... Sorry, I'm reiterating again...

Steve C said:

I am now a pensioner but programmed my first computer at school age 15. I had to program (Algol) using paper tape in a teleprinter which communicated via phone line to the mainframe computer at the local council.

My first programming was done via punch cards (IBM 026 version) for Fortran on an IBM 7040 with no disk drives, only tape drives.

x509 said:

My first programming was done via punch cards (IBM 026 version) for Fortran on an IBM 7040 with no disk drives, only tape drives.

I moved on from paper tape to punched cards at university using PL/1. The turn around time to debug a program and get it working was quite slow!

Steve C said:

I moved on from paper tape to punched cards at university using PL/1. The turn around time to debug a program and get it working was quite slow!

PL/1!! Me too.

Started with the F Compiler (with punch cards), then the Checkout and Optimizing Compiler pair (using TSO), then PL/C, the Cornell implementation. Not that I really need it but I would love to have a free or low cost PL/1 compiler that runs under Win 10 64. I just wish that companies that still have PL/1 compilers provide low-cost options for "older adults" like me who just want to do some hacking.