> From: James Broadhead [mailto:jamesbroadh...@gmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, January 30, 2012 8:15 AM
> On 30 January 2012 13:09, Michael Hampicke <gentoo-u...@hadt.biz> wrote:
> >> Technically, they did, it was just impossible for an OS to make it
> >> actually work:
> >>
> >> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/04/02/9528175.aspx
> Honestly, given that it's a single bit check per hardware change, it
> doesn't seem like all that challenging of a feature. We could have had
> autorun.inf viruses almost 5 years earlier!
The problem, IIRC, is that the floppy bus has no way of identifying a "hardware
change" even happened, so there would be nothing to trigger the hardware
re-check.
Of course you could "make it work" with all kinds of heuristics but most of
them involve getting the auto-insert check wrong at least once. That means
either spinning up the drive when it's empty ("Dear /.: Windows is stupid! It
keeps trying to read from my floppy drive when there's no disk."), or failing
to spin up when a disk is inserted and requiring user intervention ("Dear /.:
Windows is stupid! It used to know when I put a disk in my floppy and now it
stopped!").
By the time Windows 95 came along floppies were on the way out and really not
worth the hassle. Windows auto-mounts all drives on demand, so it didn't really
need to know when you put a disk in, and none of the software that came on
floppies had autorun setup. I'm kinda surprised they even spent as much time as
they did looking at it :)
