hard-sector 5 1/4 disk

That's true, actually. It was a real shock for people coming to the U.S. from post-WW1 Europe to learn that social prejudices were so strong that people perceived as "eaters of garlic" or, generally, consumers of multiple vegetables in a single meal were looked down upon as somehow inferior. That shows how insular the American attitude had become. Having sampled what was then, and by some now, still is, considered basic "meat and potatoes" cuisine, (my first wife was a midwestern preacher's daughter), I have to say this was quite silly. Americans have always been somewhat "strange" about their diet, but that's just human nature. My brother's wife and kids won't readily eat anything that's not sold at the "Golden Arches" though it can come from Burger King. It's awful to watch those now teenaged boys' (and their mother's) poking and prodding at the fine meals my now 80+ year-old mother painstakingly prepares in an effort to expose them to old-world cuisine. However, there's an easily observable basis for the beliefs regarding the Apple][ disk subsystem that I've put forth in this case, unlike the erroneous conclusions that early 20th-century Americans had drawn about diet. Clearly, there's no comparison between the CCS S-100 hardware + CP/M that I bought in 1980, and the Apple][ of the same period. However, the real fact is that there's similarly no comparison between the Apple][ of 1980 and the Apple][ of 1980 equipped with an 8" disk drive controller and two 8" drives. It's that disparity that I'm addressing, and not the Apple][ without its disk drives. The Apple][ disk subsystem was made in order to offer drives with a capacity advantage over its competitor, the TRS-80 single-density 5-14" drives. I don't remember the details of the cost difference, but the main advantage to Apple was in that they built their own drive electronics and cound benefit at the system level, cost-wise, from every little thing they left out. First of all, they didn't have to buy them, and secondly, they didn't have to tolerate and remediate their failures. They didn't have to buy the then quite costly FDC chips that their competitors used, and they didn't have to package their drives with coresident power supplies, since their packaging concept allowed them to power their drives from the Apple's PSU. The fact that they were able to pocket the cost savings, rather than passing them along to their customers, didn't find disfavor among their investors, either. However, it's still a case of "you get what they (Apple Computer Co) pay for" and they didn't pay for the same quality, and the buyer didn't get the same quality. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sellam Ismail" <foo(a)siconic.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, November 05, 2001 8:00 AM Subject: Re: hard-sector 5 1/4 disk