Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

Just post a schematic showing where these transistors go and how they will allow grounding a signal connected to the same pin on two identical standard drives (TM100s) to generate a high on one drive and a low on the other and we can end this discussion.

It goes without saying that in the PC world we are restricted to using unmodified standard off-the-shelf  disk drives available at the time, unlike in the Commodore world where pretty well all drives were customized, incompatible with each other, and in many cases almost completely unobtainable now (like the 100TPI drives that this discussion was about).

Being able to just take a standard drive from one of several different manufacturers and after checking the drive select jumper just plugging it in to add or replace a drive wasn't a bad idea IMO, better than having to open up the drive cabinet and carefully cutting some unlabelled traces on a circuit board to change the drive number.

Sure, if you're going to fill your box with proprietary custom chips etc. you can probably find different and even better ways of doing things than if you stick with standard parts.

But I'd say that far from 'damaging' the industry as a whole IBM in fact helped to expand the industry; in retrospect different choices could have been made but that takes you down a pointless path of almost infinite alternatives, with advantages and disadvantages being largely subjective opinions.

But I should have known better than to comment on one of your usual disdainful posts...





----- Original Message ----- 
From: <silverdr@wfmh.org.pl>
To: <cbm-hackers@musoftware.de>
Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2019 1:19 PM
Subject: Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?




> 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.

-- 
SD! - https://e4aws.silverdr.com/