
- Sim city for windows 95 floppy disks 3.5 driver#
- Sim city for windows 95 floppy disks 3.5 portable#
- Sim city for windows 95 floppy disks 3.5 zip#
Of course, I own the drive needed to use this media, and at least it spins up. The disk is the size of a 40MB SyQuest exchangable hard disk (works like a disk pack, 1 physical cylinder, is 5,25″ as the Bernoulli disk and has been used in PCs and Atari ST). Those who know hard disks are familiar with what we all “Bernoulli effect”, and a few of you might know its inventor, Bernard Bernoulli. The disk is labelled “Bernoulli 20” and “For Bernoulli product assistance call 1-80”, as well as “Bernoulli gold standard limited warranty five years”. I have a different 20MB disk in my hands at this moment – I’m typing this with my nose.
Sim city for windows 95 floppy disks 3.5 zip#
The 20Mb floppies were manufactured by Iomega, but they were not Zip drives, those were 100 (and later 250 and even 750, then CD-RW killed them).

Sim city for windows 95 floppy disks 3.5 portable#
(0.7GB? Come on!)īut what happened? How did portable storage get so derailed for so many years, until USB came along? How come we went for so many years without a standard? And by the time there was a method of writing that allowed us to pretend that we really could just write to them on the fly, their capacities had already become ludicrously small in comparison to what we needed to be able to write. And when you finally *could* write to them, the method was so kludgy as to make floppies seem like a futuristic technology. And then there was LS120.Īnd then we had CDs. I think those were what ended up being called Zip Drives. But how many of us ever had one? Before the 2.88MB floppies came out, I heard tell of floppies that were supposed to store an amazing 20MB. That’s as far as the standardization ever got. What’s really weird was the barrier we hit with 1.44MB “crunchies”. (BTW, you’ve never heard a floppy drive *really* grind unless you’ve had an Apple ][.)īut that was just the normal evolution of the technology. Proper floppies were 5.25 inches on a side, and much more civilized. We laughed at them, back in the day, because everyone knew that those things were ridiculously large. Still, it’s an interesting little feature that didn’t make the cut into Windows 95 (or subsequent versions). Press OK.” I can see how that would, well, suck.

Before we begin, I’m going to turn on your floppy drive light and make grinding noises. The biggest problem was that most users would eventually buy a machine with Windows 95 pre-installed, and Microsoft didn’t trust OEMs to perform the training, mostly because OEMs change suppliers all the time.Īnother option was to simply test the sequence of commands without a floppy in the drive, but Microsoft figured that users would freak out over their floppy drives going berserk for no apparent reason. This method was deemed too troublesome for a number of reasons. Microsoft came up with the idea of using an additional “training” step during setup, in which a user would be asked to inset a floppy into the drive, so that the setup routine could issue the sequence of commands and find out what style the drive used. Within these two styles, results were 100% reliable, but the difficulty was, of course, to find out what style the drive in the computer actually used. There was just one problem: floppy drive manufacturers implemented two different styles that were each other’s exact opposites: if the sequence of commands on a drive with style “a” would return a “1” if a floppy was present, drives with style “b” would return a “0”.
Sim city for windows 95 floppy disks 3.5 driver#
The person who worked on the 32bit floppy driver for Windows 95 studied the specifications in quite some detail, and he realised that by issuing just the right sequence of commands, you could determine if there was a floppy in the drive without spinning it up.

Windows 95 almost had a feature that could detect whether or not there was a floppy in the drive without spinning it up. One of the problems with floppy drives was that it was impossible to determine whether there was a floppy in the drive without actually spinning up the drive.

Remember, back in the day, before USB drives became common place, you had to use those weird square disks? We called them floppies, and they had about as much storage capacity as my current computer has in its power switch alone.
