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External floppy drives for pre-USB laptops

S

schreibstang

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Joined
Oct 8, 2013
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Location
WA, USA
All of the late 80s and early 90s laptops that didn't have a built-in floppy drive had a (I'm assuming) proprietary external floppy drive as an option. Yes, I could spend some $30 to $40 to buy one for each specific manufacturer on eBay, but would there be a way to use a modern USB external drive with a serial or parallel adapter, and then have it work in DOS, Win 3.1, or Win 95? I'd like to be able to use the same drive on more than one laptop rather than have to buy one for each! I'm not finding any external parallel or serial port floppy drives on eBay, so this was the only solution I could think of. (If you have a better idea say so!)
 
Check for a Backpack floppy. Uses parallel port. Very good quality. Works great with DOS, Win 3, and Win 9x. Currently about $40. Used to be cheaper and you might get lucky.

I don't know of any Parallel Port or Serial Port adapter that allows any USB device to be attached and I think getting drivers might be an issue.

If you have the ability to network the laptop to a modern system, you could always attach the floppy drive across the network. Not exactly convenient but how often will transferring data on floppy be needed. Should suffice for the occasional purchase of old floppy software.
 
I was pretty sure there was no way it would work, with the drivers, but it was the only option I could think of.

Thanks for the link. I missed it surrounded by all of the ZIP drives, apparently!
 
There were some laptop floppies that would plug into parallel ports on laptops that featured certain Intel chipsets. Other laptops (e.g. Grid) used a traditional floppy with a custom cable. And I think there were PCMCIA floppy adapters.
 
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