One of the reasons people keep a bridge PC around is the difficulty of writing 720k double density floppies with a modern USB floppy drive. In this blog post, I’ll share the secret of the MPF82E, a USB floppy drive that can write double density 720K disks, making it ideal for retro computing.
Sony MPF82E: The ideal USB floppy drive
The Sony MPF82E is a fully capable USB floppy drive. You can find them on eBay in two different variants. One of them is an external drive with a hardwired USB cable. It plugs right in the same way a cheap and cheerful USB floppy does, but unlike those, it is perfectly happy writing 720k floppies. You should be able to get one for around $30-$35, especially if you look early in the week.
The second variety was actually intended as an internal floppy drive for laptops, and was often rebranded, so you’ll usually find them labeled Dell or Lenovo. This variety connected internally over USB. But if you plug an appropriate USB cable, usually a mini USB to USB A cable, it works fine as an external floppy. You just don’t want to drop something heavy on it because it doesn’t have much of an enclosure around the drive mechanism.
Note that mini USB is not the size that was once super common on phones and tablets. It’s a little bit bigger than that connector. That size fell out of favor as smartphones became popular, but it was fairly common until a few years ago. The cables are still available if you don’t happen to have one in your stash.
And if you happen to use Linux, CubicleNate has a nice tutorial on writing images to a USB floppy drive in Linux.
A substitute for a bridge PC?
There is nothing wrong with having a bridge PC, which I would define as a PC old enough to have an internal 3.5 in disk drive but new enough to be capable of running an operating system that can connect over the network to a modern PC so it can either retrieve or receive disk images so you can write them to actual floppy disks. Windows XP or Windows 7 are two good candidates. Don’t connect them to the Internet. But on your home network, they’re fine.
But a bridge PC can be a barrier for entry to someone who is relatively new to retro computing. They may not have a suitable PC just laying around, so that means having something else to acquire, and they might prefer to spend that money on something a bit more retro.
The other issue is that retro computing can take up a lot of space. When push comes to shove, I’d rather keep one more retro machine set up than a bridge PC that is really only serving as a bridge PC. And that goes double for a machine in storage.
Solving the problem
Personally, I would much rather have a small USB floppy drive that I can connect to any modern PC to write images after downloading than a single purpose bridge PC.
In my case, Sony’s MPF82E external floppy drive isn’t something I need to rely on regularly. But I am glad the option exists, because it gives me flexibility. And it is even more useful for someone who only has a modern PC and is trying to build up some sort of an XT-class PC or, for that matter, an Atari St. It’s not exactly news to ST owners that you can write ST floppies with a PC floppy drive without doing anything special. But if you didn’t know that, now you do.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.