In Mar. 5 (?) Edupage, there's a blurb about a floppy drive that is compat with 1.44M disks but can also handle special 80M disks, allegedly available in April.
Several years ago Insite had a "floptical" drive that could handle both regular 3 1/2" and special 20Mb flopical drives. Iomega followed suit and there was an industry spec. Compression would yeid 40 Mb capacity to a marketeer. (Can tell a floptical disk easily - the write protect slide is on the other side). Was a great idea then that was marred by U$500 for the drive and U$20 for the cartriges. Never flew. Three years development would give 80 Mb easily (100 Mb Iomega "ZIP" disks could have been put in a normal 3 1/2 case - is a lot of waste space on either side. Think it was kind of dumb that they didn't but suppose there is a marketing reason - probably the same marketeers that insisted that each new Bernoulli be incompatable with earlier ones.) Major difference is that the floptical could be made bootable but then it had a special SCSI card, did not plug into the normal floppy controller & have to tell the BIOS that drive B was not there. The card then added a BIOS extension similar to what I mentioned in an earlier post to access the disk. For that matter, any drive that has a controller on the bus *could* be made bootable with a PROM. It is only those that plug into the parallel port - all of which require special drivers - that would need "help". Warmly, Padgett