The first 3.5” drive I ever had was in an LC II. Before that I had only used a 5.25 in a PC XT or something like that. Being able to have it suck a disc in or ejecting a disc and having it pop out with that great mechanical noise was fantastic.
Because my age I thought all drives were like that. The first time I used a Windows PC (3.0?) I was surprised that you had to push the disc in by hand and that it didn’t just show up on the desktop in Windows. I had to be introduced to the concept of drive letters. Seemed relatively barbaric to young me.
Of course within about two years I was asking for my own PC for all the great games. So that didn’t last all that long.
Hah, yes my childhood experience with these was similar. There was your typical 8 bitter 5.25" floppy with its floppiness and rattly drives and make-it-double-sided-with-a-hole-punch diy-ness. And then there was the 3.5" hard plastic square, straight out of Star Wars. A robot would eat it and regurgitate it for you on command.
That is really interesting, in that it is the opposite of my childhood understanding. I started with CP/M and DOS, and the first time I came to a Linux machine, I just couldn't understand how someone could work with drives without the letters (dedicated namespaces, right). My thought was that it was a less polished design.
Funnily enough, Microsoft actually planned to add floppy drive auto-mount on Windows 95. But half the drives implemented the signal for "media present" backwards from the other half, and Microsoft couldn't figure out a user-friendly way to make it auto-detect, so they canned it
I think a Colour Classic still has an auto inject drive, my LC II had one. You can tell the manual inject ones because the case has a curved indent around the drive. Although this is the changeover era, as some late LC IIs apparently have the different drive (and lose the Snow White stipe along the front at the same time).
Auto inject was gone from Macs well before this model so it wasn't directly connected to the cheapness of this thing.