Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

From: didier derny <didier_at_aida.org>
Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2019 07:44:47 +0100
Message-ID: <04a600d7-f073-57c9-1fe1-3a85de57520c@aida.org>
I dont know if commodore cheated or not with the floppy disks

but from 1980 to 1985 I was using floppy disks intensively (instead of a 
hard drive) and they worked fine (I rarely had problems)

when I started using PCs in 1987 it was a nightmare, (I had a hard drive 
and was only using floppies  only for transfer)

bad disks were very common and installing unix from floppy disk was 
hell  (80 floppy disks  around 10% of non working floppy disk

  had for be replaced before completing the install)


perhaps that ibm should have learned from commodore....




On 1/5/2019 7:19 PM, silverdr@wfmh.org.pl wrote:
>
>> On 2019-01-05, at 00:07, Mike Stein <mhs.stein@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> * - the kind of "engineers" who thought it to be a great idea to cut'n twist flat cables before installing a plug for example
>> Personally, I think the twisted cable was a brilliant hack!
>>
>> Given two daisy-chained drives with the motor on/off signal on pin 16, how would you individually turn each separate motor on or off?
> I have a deja vu.. we discussed it here before, didn't we? It could be called a brilliant hack if you did it at home while hacking things together just to make your bunch of components somehow run before Monday's dawn comes upon you with its day-job duties. And only if you were tired enough to realise that one transistor per drive would not only do the job but neither forced the logical drive id depend on the position on the cable nor render additional select lines useless because of your hack, etc. But we said it all before. This is "PC engineering" - one of the reasons many people, including /me loved Amiga so much at the time. Because it didn't contain much of "PC engineering". It was much more designed, and much less "brilliantly" hacked together. History now either way but please don't tell me that cutting and twisting parts of the flat cable was clever engineering. In the long run it was probably even more expensive to produce those "PC only" cables, not to mention other damage to the industry as a whole.
>
Received on 2019-01-06 08:00:03

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