Apple Floppy Drives (was: More Apple Pimpers)

RE: apple II I've worked around and with them. Never serious 6502 programming but used apps on them like UCSD pascal. The disks worked ok compared to my NS* {NS* disk controllers are reliable} and yes they were sensitive only to the extent that an unshielded 34pins cable didn't like to be near some monitors. The tubes in metal cases were ok but some of the plastic cased ones tended to radiate noise that the cables seemed to find. It's beauty was the basic logic was simple as were the drive hardware and that helped it work better than most. Some of the better floppy systems of the time where neither simple nor cheap. RE: trs80 trashing disks! And slow! Slow was running the z80 at 1.7mhznot the disks fault though the step rates were really slow even for sa400s!.. See above and yep the tube was plastic cased and worse hot chassis! Grounding was poor on the drives, their internal regulators were at limits current wise plus the data separator in the EI was very poor. Not to worry though, as most tended to crash from the sloppy and noisy console to EI interface. drives on the >Osborne were, based on extensive experience, the least reliable ever made. If one with the double density upgrade, it was much worse. That was the drives and I always thought the SA400 series to be really poor even though my NS* had three of them. TM100s were not much better! Also there was some really bad media based on some of the media failures I've had over the years. The SA400 was the slowest, most unreliable floppy of the time, it made everything it was attached to look bad. The worst part is many vendors of early 5.25 drives had their own version of worst at one point or another. drives, that couldn't >format disks? The drives could but the controller didn't, therein lies the difference. The RX02 was old when the 1771 FDC was young so comments based on post 1980 tech are not reflective of then(pre 1980s). I'd call the RX01/2 the 1970s version of an IDE floppy as it was smart and executed commands that were higher level than even the 1771, mostly due to the microcoded controller. The RX01/2 were reliable enough though the RX50 was pretty poor. In my book after the RX02 the next useable floppy from DEC was the RX33 (teac FD-55GFR). The commie controllers were a good idea that suffered from poor implementation. they were fast in themselves but the serial link was limited. Allison