Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gerrit Heitsch" <gerrit@laosinh.s.bawue.de>
To: <cbm-hackers@musoftware.de>
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2019 6:08 AM
Subject: Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?


> On 1/7/19 9:02 PM, Mike Stein wrote:
>> 
>> The alternative of turning on the motor with the DS signal would mean delaying access until the motor came up to speed; imagine disk-to-disk copy with relatively crude belt-driven motors starting and stopping with every access...
> 
> Well, a proper disk-2-disk copy doesn't switch drives after each block 
> or file, it reads as much as it can into memory and then writes it out 
> again.
--
What's your point? I said after every access, not every block; why is it such a bad idea to be able to keep the motor running for a second or two in case it's accessed again? 


>> It's so easy to sit back and criticize the decisions and choices made in the distant past without fully taking into account the constraints that influenced them.
> 
> Most of the stuff on the PC was 'has to be cheap'. That's why they used 
> the 8088 and not the 8086, clocked it at 4,77 MHz (which is the NTSC 
> color crytsal, 14,318 MHz divided by 3) and made a few other 
> questionable decisions like active high IRQ lines.
--
Again, what's your point? Of course it was designed to be cheap, unlike VICs and C64s which Tramiel demanded be built to quality no matter what the cost.

The point is that within that constraint the twisted cable was a clever way of allowing individual motor control of the floppy drives when everyone else either ran them constantly or used non-standard drives. Period.

I think it was a clever hack; if you insist on seeing it as evidence of the incompetence of the designers and engineers who had to build it within the usual constraints, so be it.