Floppies
========

I always wanted to have a floppy disk drive in my computers. At the moment I
have a 3.5" floppy drive in my SGI Indy. Actually it's a floptical drive for 21
MB disks which also accepts regular 3.5" 1.44MB floppies. But it is broken.

As the Indy requires some special setup (front panel and button have to be
remove and the floppy must be controllable by computer - including ejection of
media (of course, it has to be a SCSI device) I tried to use some more common
devices in the SGI Indigo. The Indigo has space for floppy drives with a front
panel and has no problem with ejection button (there is enough space for it).
Also the Indigo with IRIX 5.3 cannot use more modern devices (like the Zip
drives) so DDS1 (DDS2?) tapes and the floppies are possibly the only removable
media that can be used here.

During the time I have acquired several pieces: two Insite floptical drives
(which should be compatible with SGIs) and even one original device which was
pulled off the SGI Indigo.

Well, none of them works. One of them is even detected by the computer but
that's all. 


I also have a bunch of external floppy drives: one for Psion MC600 (without
connection cable and without the power adapter), one for Psion Series 3 (this
one is obviously damaged and incomplete). I also have 3 (!) USB floppy drives
they worked with Linux machines but I have to test it they are compatible with
W10 (at work) and with modern Ubuntu (at home).


Update: on the Ubuntu (16.04 on the GPD Pocker) the USB floppy drive works as
expected. Even the icon in the Unity launcher is correct. ;-)