On 2014-07-21 at 21:10:58, MikeS (dm561@torfree.net) wrote: > perhaps we can still salvage something > constructive out of this: We can try. > I don't want this to turn into a flame war either so, even granting that > your difficulties and injuries were actually caused by the 'twist' and not > cheap cases and wrong cables, The cables were not wrong. Those were the cables that came with the equipment and would work perfectly if their connectors could be connected to the drives in the order they were mounted. Not in the unnatural order required to satisfy the "twisted" standard. Yes, the cases were cheap Chinese design. Unfortunately it was what 95% of people were buying those days. If they were of better quality, it would possibly help avoiding the injuries but not that much the connection problems. I still have a small pile of floppy cables and a drawer of those IDC connectors (both the "edge" and "goldpin") somewhere. A bad reminder of the times, when I never knew when I'd need them urgently ;-) > Assuming that it is a good thing to be able to just spin one drive at a time > instead of having to spin them all together, how would you go about it using > the stock Shugart-compatible drives of the day, e.g. the common TM-100? It was IBM. IBM was big enough already at the time they endowed the world with "PC", wasn't it? Being as big as they were, I bet they could (at no cost) make the drives manufacturer add a simple gate to the /drives'/ electronics. If I am not mistaken now, one (1!) transistor would do. And I bet again every drive manufacturer would bow to IBMs order as there were not that many customers for their products that could buy stuff in quantities. Then we wouldn't have problems with Amiga drives being "non-standard" (except the 3.5 HD ones, that is) etc. > What is at least one of your alternate possible "solutions"? The above. At least one. -- SD! Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing listReceived on 2014-07-21 22:00:33
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