Re: MFM drive gone nuts

My point was that, unlike a CBM8050 for example where you have to replace a 
Tandon with an identical Tandon, an MPI with an identical MPI etc., in the 
PC world and to a lesser extent even the CP/M and UNIX worlds drives of the 
same capacity were indeed mostly 'standard', albeit with various 
configuration options.

Thus you could replace your Tandon drive with an equivalent MPI, Qume, 
Rodime, Shugart, Panasonic, Epson, NEC, what have you, as long as you 
configured it for the particular computer system in which you were 
installing it; if you were moving it from a PC to another PC then you could 
indeed just pull it out of one computer and put it in another without 
concern for jumpers or even whether it was drive A or B.

IMO it was actually hard drives and controllers that were "shockingly 
non-standard" with all sorts of different CHS configurations that had to be 
determined and manually entered (at least until auto-configuration BIOSes 
came along); replacing one hard drive with another was sometimes very 
cumbersome or even impossible, especially if you wanted to boot from it 
and/or use its full capacity, and reading a given drive with a different 
controller than the one originally used was (and is) almost always totally 
impossible.

m

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "smf" <smf@null.net>
To: <cbm-hackers@musoftware.de>
Sent: Monday, July 21, 2014 4:55 PM
Subject: Re: MFM drive gone nuts


> >I suppose I'm picking nits, but with a few exceptions it was really the
>>various different interface configurations used by the *computers* of the
>>day that were non-standard (until IBM effectively established a de facto
>>'standard').
>
> I said "floppy drives were shockingly non-standard.", whose fault it was 
> is irrelevant. You can't just pick up a drive from one computer and put it 
> in another, therefore there is no common standard for the drives.
>
> The floppy drive manufacturers went along with it, with the disk change 
> and ready line it appears to have been an option from day one.
>
>
>
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