18 Nov
2007
18 Nov
'07
4:59 a.m.
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2007 21:59:02 +0000 (GMT)
From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell)
Subject: Re: "intelligent" disk drives
<snip>
As an aside, IMHO one of the worst mistakes commodore
made was that the
8050 could not at least read the disks of the earlier drives.
-tony
--------
Sort of unavoidable because to get the 500MB/side they went to 100TPI drives.
Not as big a problem then as it may be today, because the high price of
the 8050/8250s tended to put them into a different market, mostly business
and institutional, where price and compatibility with the smaller and cheaper
units wasn't usually an issue. And of course the IEEE bus was compatible
so you could easily convert among drives (until the serial versions came
along) as long as you had one of the (also expensive) IEEE<>IEEE cables.
m