Apple Floppy Drives (was: More Apple Pimpers)

Ugh! ... you'd be hard pressed to pick a worse example of a "standard" inteface to a floppy disk than the one used in the TRS-80, though lots of allegations were made about it. The TRS-80 is a poor example, apparenly right up to the model IV, and I know very little about its reputation. Tony Duell recently pointed out that his early experience with that indicated that it worked fairly well when the drives were well maintained. I only became familiar with the TRS-80 as a problem to be solved. In '81, I bought a CCS S-100 setup, which was the first complete "system" I'd bought from a single vendor, and attached it to a terminal. At that point I figured that was all it took. I didn't ever have a problem with that hardware/software, and I used that setup so much I ultimately bought a second one just like it, with another two Mistubishi 8" drives. I don't think I even thought about possible diskette failures. Most of the fellows I knew, at the time, to be Apple users, had other systems, mostly homebrews, and those either didn't have disk drives, or had 8" types, as I had on my homebrew box. It was pretty obvious from the fact that most folks who were using the Apple in an attempt to do something other than either make or break copy protection for Apple games, which a couple of the guys were doing, and making good money at it, that one had to have 8" drives in order to have reliable disk function on the Apple. Most of the guys I knew at the time who made money with their Apple]['s were doing it with 8" drives, even though they had to deliver their work product on Apple diskettes. The IWM was, indeed, incredible. It did several things that were extremely significant, particularly because of the favorable treadoff between hardware and software, to help the bottom line. It did so, however, at the cost that the resulting subsystem was a mite prone to hiccup, which it still is. It was never fixed, since there really isn't a way to fix it. It's fragile, and the only way to live with that is to recognize the vulnerabilities, and to work around them, which is clearly possible. In 1981, the PC was released, and that was the death knell for computers like the Apple. Even so, they hung on for several years. Even devoted Apple][ fans, though, have, for the most part, sobered up enough since the '80's to recognize that the Apple floppy disk subsystem wasn't as solid as one might have hoped. As for the SBC's, Osborne did have FDC problems, as did Otrona. The Xerox 820, the Ferguson Big Board, and both of their scions, always were pretty stabile, though, and, frankly, I seldom heard about disk drive problems in the context of CP/M boxes, virtually all of which used pretty vanilla flavored FD subsystems. In the 8-9 years that I used 8" drives as my main medium for data interchange, I had perhaps two or three diskette failures that I remember, and I don' think many others had more trouble than I did. That is not what I read and heard about the Apple disk subsystem. Lots of people loved the Apple. The packaging concept was so successful that IBM even emulated it, though they were somewhat weak in their concept of size. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Louis Schulman" <louiss(a)gate.net> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2001 7:48 PM Subject: Apple Floppy Drives (was: More Apple Pimpers) Well, I have owned a reliable disk drive from the disks! And slow! on the Osborne were, could read what another had much worse. operate the drives, and even that couldn't format disks?