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macOS Tahoe still has floppy drive support.
by retired 6mo ago
macOS Tahoe still has floppy drive support.
- ryandrake 6mo agoReally? Like actual internal floppy drives, and not just USB floppy drives (which even Windows still supports)? I actually wouldn't expect macOS to support actual floppy drives since the OS's list of supported devices doesn't include any that shipped with floppy drives. The fact that I cannot install the latest macOS on any devices older than 2019 is a related, but separate problem.
- nxobject 6mo agoIn this case, what would internal floppy drive mean? The last Macs with floppy drives (I think Old World G3s?) used a custom Apple controller, integrated into the chipset, with a bespoke 20-pin cable.
- kalleboo 6mo agoEven on the old world G3s, Mac OS X never had floppy drive support. There was a driver someone had ported from BSD you could install.
- retired 6mo agoUSB floppy drives indeed.
- skissane 6mo agoA USB floppy drive behaves almost identically to a USB hard drive-yet another SCSI block device. The cost of keeping support for them is minimal This is very different from legacy PC floppy drive controllers which spoke a completely different protocol, which was very complex and full of footguns Legacy floppy controllers also had various legacy features almost nobody used, like soft deletion of sectors (IBM added this in the 70s for use with primitive database systems), or attaching tape drives using the floppy interface (nowadays if you buy a brand new tape drive, the interface options are SAS or Fibre Channel)
- jonhohle 6mo agoYes! And Zip Disk support. I have an app that has to detect different external media types and have a pile of old drives that work just fine.