Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

Den Sat, 5 Jan 2019 19:19:43 +0100 skrev silverdr@wfmh.org.pl:
> 
> 
> > 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.

IMHO it's actually rather brilliant as it's the only way to use
more than one existing standard drive mechanism on the same cable and
being able to turn on/off each motor individually.

The only way to solve this with standard drives without twisting the
cable is to have one cable for each drive. This is what Ericsson (the
company that much later joined up with Sony on their mobile phone
production) did in their "Ericsson PC", an almost PC-compatible 8088
machine (the only thing that weren't compatible is the keyboard
controller, and some strange thing in the BIOS which for some reason
makes some compiler directives for Turbo Pascal to not work properly :O
).

> 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.

All Amigas which could contain more than one drive internally (A2000,
A3000, A4000) did run all drive motors even when only drive were used.
A stupid way to waste power.

The Amiga solution would had been brilliant if it had been implemented
years earlier in the first Shugart 5.25" drives. As soon as the Shugart
drives did enter the marked, it was impossible to change such basic
thing as how the motors were turned on and off. History shows that the
only way for the first product to not set the standard is if that
product isn't good enough in doing what it is intended for. That's the
reason for Betamax (first world wide video cassette system) and 3com
3C500/3C501 (first ISA ethernet card) didn't become the standard, while
CD (first widely spread optical audio disc) and Sound Blaster
(first consumer-priced digital audio in/out ISA card) became standards.
(In case you wounder, the 3C500/3C501 were utterly crap as it couldn't
buffer any data - i.e. while the CPU read the data just received, any
further received data would be lost).



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