Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

From: Mia Magnusson <mia_at_plea.se>
Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2019 15:13:54 +0100
Message-ID: <20190106151354.00003e0b@plea.se>
Den Sat, 5 Jan 2019 23:19:15 +0000 skrev smf <smf@null.net>:
> On 05/01/2019 21:16, Mike Stein wrote:
> >   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).
> 
> Everyone phoned up shugart and ordered their floppy drives off the
> menu, all drives were customized.

The whole idea behind the original IBM PC was to only use off-the-shelf
parts, so when they phoned Tandon (not Shugart, unless there were talks
that didn't result in any deal) they just ordered their standard
40-track 5.25" Shugart compatible drive.

> There were plenty other systems with differently configured drives,
> but they aren't as memorable as commodore/ibm/apple.

There were a few systems that used a 26 pin connector, getting rid of
some unused pins. IBM used a strange pinout with power on some pins
(much like the more modern 2.5" IDE hard disks) on their PS/2 systems.

Otherwise I can't think of any company except Apple and Commodore that
didn't use standard Shugart compatible drives (or the likewise common
8" interface if we are talking about really old drives).


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Received on 2019-01-06 16:00:30

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