Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

On 1/10/19 9:47 PM, Mike Stein wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Gerrit Heitsch" <gerrit@laosinh.s.bawue.de>
> To: <cbm-hackers@musoftware.de>
> Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2019 3:11 PM
> Subject: Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?
> 
> 
>> On 1/10/19 5:35 PM, Mike Stein wrote:
>>> I definitely don't want to revive/continue the floppy cable argument, but I'm really curious whether there is another way.
>>>
>>> It's 1980, you're an IBM engineer in Boca Raton and your boss comes over to your desk, drops a pair of Tandon TM-100s on it and says, "I've got a challenge for you: we need a way to individually control the drive motors on these drives without modifying the drives; can you do it?"
>>>
>>> What would you do/say?
>>
>> The first question would be 'Why do you think you need to do that?'
>> Quite often people who ask for a certain feature don't have all the
>> facts or started from the wrong premises.
>>
>>   Gerrit
> ----
> Hard to say at this point, but the various explanations were insufficient power, unnecessary wear and tear on drives and diskettes, and standardization of the drives.
> 
> And of course the engineer beside you who piped up with "I can do that" instead of telling the boss that he didn't have all the facts or was starting from the wrong premises would probably get a raise and/or be promoted ahead of you... ;-)

Unlikely. A good engineer first finds out what the customer really wants 
(or needs) before saying 'I can do that'. Because if he doesn't, sooner 
or later he will regret having said those 4 words.

  Gerrit