Floppy Manuals

Finally, some manuals for 5.25 and 8 inch MPI drives. These are useful because these models were OEM'd to literally hundreds of companies. Some had a different connector, used hard sectoring, etc. There were dozens of different colours. And many used their own labels so you didn't know who actually made the drive. But for all the hundreds of configurations, the mechanics were the same (except for pulley changes to 50 cycle, and capacitor change to 220V AC). If you are playing around with old floppies, you might find these manuals useful. There is an amazing amount of common mechanics and circuitry. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/discs/77715900_9428_HwMaint_Sep85.pdf and http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/discs/75897465_9404B_floppyMaint.pdf One of the things I did then was create and track all the different configurations. I know that at one time, I had more than 60 colour schemes on the 8 inch floppy. We tried to avoid doing a separate manual for each config. Instead the basic manual was sent along with an Errata sheet for unique features. These multiple configurations are what eventually killed the maintenance manuals. The documentation department was getting bigger than the engineering group! It wasn't possible to OEM hundreds of configurations and document each with a separate manual. A poll of the customers showed that most only needed interface data for design. So schematics and parts lists and wire lists all went the way of the dinosaurs. Designers were sent engineering drawings on request. Lest you think this is an exaggeration, my notes show that we had more than 2500 separate configurations of the Hawk, a 14 inch cartridge drive (10 MB). I also see that there were more than 500 configurations of the CMD, another 14 inch cartridge drive (96 MB). There was even a room that had the different configurations charted on the walls - all 4 walls. I understand the feeling of those on this list about maintenance manuals. But they didn't have to live with this nightmare. All the mini companies and the early PC companies wanted to differentiate their products. Compatibility was anathema. If customers could read their disk on another system, they might buy it instead of yours. Using different formats, sectoring, interface connectors were all part of protecting market share. But companies trying to fulfill all these unique requirements were drowning in the details. Support finally became impossible - so a generic approach was taken. Then further simplification was done until only a fluff manual was done. Billy