4 Feb
2007
4 Feb
'07
12:04 p.m.
[Apple ][]
In a way, I suppose the disk controller was a clever
design. But it
In once sense it was, it was a very minimal-component-count design. But I
do wish it had had a track 0 sensor (which wouldn't have added much to
the design and would have kept the drives in alignment a little
longer...).
The downside was that it was incompatible with everythign else. You
couldnt send disks to owneres of other machines. That to me is a major
minus-point.
locked the CPU into 2MHz operation. The use of a
simple arithmetic
checksum for each sector was not perhaps the most reliable solution
either. But the biggest problem is that disk reading and writing
required 100% attention from the CPU. On most other computers that
Apple seem to have an aversion to interrupts (This carried on into the
early Macs too it appears).
-tony