[tony duell] :> "lart"? :Lusr Attidute Readjustment Tool... What you want to use on the idiot :who's just fed a banana through the card reader :-) hehehe :> the only irritating thing about you, tony, is that everything we say we want, you pop up and say you've got ;> we have a feeling that eventually all obsolete computer equipment in britain will gravitate to chez duell... :I always thoguht the Commodore method of keeping the disk turning :at the same speed and changing the data rate made more sense. :Certainly seeking would be faster as you wouldn't have to wait for :the disk speed to change and stabilise. on the other hand, it makes the electronics more difficult, as suddenly you have to design a pll that will reliably lock to about 10 different data rates, rather than just one, not to mention making sure the controller can handle it. to make it practical to decode in software, the apple probably got it right - and let's face it, certainly in later years commodore never really got the hang of the speed disks should run at... also, it's worth bearing in mind that the mac had a very fine grain of control over the speed of the disk drive originally, and could bump it up a notch (out of 400 or so) if it was running a little on the slow side. because the data decode was in software, that was feasible. :> it wasn't a cheap design, but it was what the ibm should have :>been if it *had* to use that particular architecture... :Having looked at a number of non-PC 8088/8086 machines, I am :convinced that _all_ of them are superior to the IBM PC... not hard, given the design principles of the pc. on the other hand, they're still hamstrung by the basic architecture of the thing. were there any non-pc-compatible 286 machines produced? the original apricot xen series springs to mind, but how good was that? [daybreak] :> hmm - so how much did you pay for it then...? :> :\pounds 10.00 including 19" mono monitor, floppy drive and tape :streamer, but missing the keyboard and mouse. You're right - I did :buy it. just call us psychic ;> [tiger] :Rumour was that the selling price for the CPU unit (The CPU was in :the keyboard case - it looks a little like a BBC micro with :multi-coloured function keys) would have been around \pounds 3000. :No wonder they never sold any... no wonder. a case of not only completely missing the market, but also the point... -- Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her... Net-Tamer V 1.08X - Test Drive