[Gllug] Old hardware heading for the bin

[John Winters]

Chris Bell wrote:
> I am not sure what would make an Acorn floppy drive
> different from any other,

The obvious difference in an Acorn 3.5" floppy drive is a signal line 
which tells the computer when a disk is inserted/ejected.  This enabled 
the original Archimedes to do some very intelligent disk handling.  You 
could eject and insert floppy disks willy nilly (provided they weren't 
actually being accessed at the time) and the OS could keep track of 
which one was currently in the drive.  When it needed to read data from 
a particular one it would prompt you to put it in the drive.

The bit I liked best was doing a "umount" (called something different of 
course) of a disk not currently in the drive and the OS would then ask 
you to re-insert the relevant disk so that it could tidy things up.  I 
think you could have up to 8 disks mounted in a single drive simultaneously.

John
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