Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

From: Gerrit Heitsch <gerrit_at_laosinh.s.bawue.de>
Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2019 12:08:35 +0100
Message-ID: <59adb80d-7e97-f761-785a-3841b43f3fd8@laosinh.s.bawue.de>
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.


> 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.

  Gerrit
Received on 2019-01-08 13:00:03

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