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I finally rebooted yesterday after 10 days and a bit of uptime. Most everything had slowed down to an excruciating crawl, and Finder performance was getting increasingly flaky. The final straw was when Finder icons stopped highlighting when clicked, although they would still drag or open on a double-click. A restart restored speed and responsiveness to the best Jaguar is capable of on the Pismo, which is to say still sluggish, but tolerable. The Finder glitches were eliminated by the restart as well. 10 days between restarts is not bad, but performance for the last three days of the 10 was pretty horrible. The memory leak or whatever the problem is doesn’t seem to be unique to my machine, based on letters from others I’ve received, but it still remains something of a mystery. Moving along, I have a VST SuperDisk Expansion Bay drive for the Pismo that I’ve never really used, but recently I’ve pressed an old PowerBook 1400 into service as a text editing platform (you can read more about that on The Road Warrior over at MacOpinion this week), and it would be convenient to be able to transfer files between the Pismo and the 1400 via floppy. 
The issue of floppy support in OS X had never really occupied my attention until now, but when I stuck the VST drive into the Pismo and inserted a floppy, I got a dialog saying that this disk was of a format not recognized by the System -- or somesuch. A trip to the SmartDisk/VST support site confirmed that: “The SuperDisk Drive for 1999 and 2000 PowerBook G3 is not supported on Mac OS X 10.2.” [apparently for neither SuperDisk media or floppies] It is supported by up to Mac OS 9.2.2 -- another point in favor of dual-booting. A bit of further digging revealed that there is OS X floppy support for certain USB external floppy drives, depending, it seems, on the availability of driver software, but not for internal floppy drives such as the ones in the beige G3 desktops, or presumably the PowerBook WallStreet floppy drive module. Apparently there are software hacks available that can restore floppy support for the internal floppy drives in the beige G3s, but not for many third-party drives. This is annoying, as the existence of floppy support for some drives in OS x indicates that it is doable, but just wasn’t bothered with. That makes the VST SuperDisk module, which sold new a little over two years ago for about $200, useless in OS X. It’s not a major big deal. I can transfer files to older Macs in various other ways, but “dead” or not, there is nothing quite as convenient as the old floppy when you just want to tranfer a small file or two between two computers. And while it’s not an issue for me, those who have to interact with the PC world on a regualr basis would find floppy support a big help. Dell’s recent decision to phase out the dloppy notwithstanding, it’s going to be around for a good long time yet. While floppy disk production peaked at at five billion diskettes in 1997, the number of floppy diskettes sold last year would still wrap around the world three times, if stacked end-to-end. Imation alone is still cranking out about 2 million floppies a day. That’s a lot of floppies!
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