21 Jul
2008
21 Jul
'08
7:41 a.m.
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:21:41 +0100 (BST)
From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell)
Only after carefully examining the floppy drive cable
did I realise it
was not a normal 20 way ribon. 1 or 2 of the 'cores' were solid plastic,
with no wire. So no connection between those pins at the ends of the
cable.
IIRC, the colour of the pin-1 marker on these cables is important -- it
indicates which cores are missing.
There is a yellow striped cable and a red striped cable. The color
stripes are the pin-1 marker, but the different colors indicated different
wiring.
And people wonder why I hate working on Apple stuff...
Oh, I doubt that many of us, even the ones who concentrate all their
classic computer fun on Apple machines, really wonder at that. :-) I try
not to dwell on the silly hardware decisions and focus on the things I
like, but there are these oddities which consume little bits of my wetware
memory--like the differently striped floppy cables.
And I more or less ignore the existence of the old models that were very
poor design decisions from the concept, such as the 68030 based machines
with 16 bit data busses.
The SE/30 though, there's an elegant little machine--with just enough
imperfections to provide fodder for the hardware hacking inclined. :-)
Jeff Walther