July 6th, 2010

Hardware backward compatibility: The firmware that missed one tiny detail

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The person responsible for the floppy disk driver in Windows 95 also was responsible for the low-level CD-ROM drivers. (Not to be confused with the CDFS file system, which was handled by the file system team, not the hardware driver folks.) And I remember a story about one particularly strange CD-ROM drive. This drive was produced by a name-brand manufacturer. The box that the drive comes in proudly announces that it is an IDE ATAPI drive. And they did a fantastic job. They implemented all the ATAPI commands that were defined at the time, with one tiny exception.

They forgot to implement the “Are you an ATAPI drive?” command.

Category
Old New Thing
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History

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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