old flopy drive on parallel port

[Warren Block]

On Sat, 27 Dec 2008, Matthias Apitz wrote:

> I've just thrown away an very old laptop which was running FreeBSD 2.2.5
> in the mid of the 90's; this have had an external 3.5 inch floppy drive,
> connected through a cable to the parallel port and this way fully supported,
> even for the basic installation of FreeBSD which was based on making a
> boot-able floppy; I saved this drive because I still have some old
> floppies here around and at home no other drive to read them;

Support may have been through hardware on the laptop.  ISTR some old 
machines doing that: a special parallel-port floppy would be seen by the 
system, and the OS wouldn't know the difference.

> My question is: can it be used / plug'eg in without any danger into to parallel
> port of my actual laptop (Fujitsu Siemens) and is this somehow still supported
> in FreeBSD 7.0 as well?

If it was hardware supported by the old laptop, it could do bad things 
to a current system.  Physical "let the smoke out" things.

External USB floppy drives are cheap, although I don't know how well 
they work with FreeBSD.

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA