Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

Den Tue, 8 Jan 2019 18:55:45 +0100 skrev silverdr@wfmh.org.pl:
> 
> 
> > On 2019-01-08, at 18:36, Mia Magnusson <mia@plea.se> wrote:
> > 
> > I don't really think it's a big issue that you would need two
> > different sets of cables depending on which type of case you had.
> 
> You somewhat oversimplify the number of possible cases. I remember
> people bringing boards and cases that wouldn't fit together.

That is another issue. The original AT main board had screw holes in
other places than the original PC and XT main boards. Also the original
AT case were slightly taller, allowing slightly taller ISA cards.
Another issue were 8-bit ISA cards hanging down beyond the ISA
connector, making them not fit 16-bit ISA slots and/or touching stuff
on the mother board.

> > When tower cases started to be a thing they were equipped with
> > hard drives anyway, so the only usage of two drives were to have
> > both a 3.5" and a 5.25" drive and then A/B didn't really matter
> > that much any more.
> 
> That's exactly the time when it started to matter most. That's the
> time I still bear scars on my hands from. People come and say I want
> _this_ drive to be "A", not that one. And another one comes and say
> the opposite. While they were the same type I din't have any major
> problems because (with very few exceptions) nobody cared. Once it
> started to be two drives of different size, which couldn't be
> rearranged inside the case, the whole thing started to cause trouble.
> And it's was not the time I could order a roll of flat cable and a
> bag of IDC plugs in both edge and pin forms over the internet and
> have it on my desk the next day. It's been the times one had to work
> with what came with the customer.

The simple solution for a computer technician at the time would be to
stock longer cables with all connectors mounted, and charging the
customer extra if they weren't satisfied with whichever configuration
that were possible with the shorter cables.

In my experience, the problems weren't the twisted cables but rather
that there were different connector types on 5.25" v.s. 3.5" drives
and on the original IBM PC/XT floppy controller v.s. most other floppy
controllers, and also the position of the connectors that weren't at
the cables end could case problems regardless of which order you wanted
the drives at.



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