19 Nov
2007
19 Nov
'07
4:52 p.m.
From: tshoppa at wmata.com
Chuck wrote:
In the late 90's, we were using Micropolis drives in our HaL
computers. Many wouldn't even finish our 24 Hour burn-in.
When they were making choices as to which drive to use,
I was surprised when I was told that they'd go with the Micropolis
drive. By that time, they'd already earned a bad name.
I was told that the decision was made, based on that fact
that they would give us any engineering support we needed.
I saw this as a red flag but the upper people didn't. I couldn't
understand why we would need any support for something
as mature as hard drives of the time.
I suspect that bad marketing decisions were made at Micropolis,
like the ones that were made at HaL. Engineering didn't have there
act to gether before the products were in production. I've
seen it happen at otherplaces. Schedule is king and at some
point the engineers will just stand and nod their heads ( as
they get their resumes ready ).
Dwight
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Micropolis floppy drives were very well-made. I
wish that modern
drives could be as well-built. All of mine are still operational.
I think that like CDC/Imprimis, Seagate, Shugart, etc., Micropolis
built drives to different price points for different markets.
The ones built for the mini and mainframe market in the late
80's/very early 90's are true tanks and stand up very solidly
here 15 or 20 years later.
But by the mid-late-90's when capacity was the craze I think that
some industrial-duty Micropolis drives were a little too bleeding
edge.
The MFM ones built for PC-clones, however, seem to simply be "above
average", which is pretty good but not stellar.
19 Nov
19 Nov
4:58 p.m.
New subject: Micropolis (was: "intelligent" disk drives
Micropolis made excellent floppy drives. It is too bad that their hard
drives sucked.
Did anybody ever use their OS? (bundled with some of their 5.25" floppy
drives)
5:47 p.m.
New subject: Micropolis
Fred Cisin wrote:
Micropolis made excellent floppy drives. It is too
bad that their hard
drives sucked.
Did anybody ever use their OS? (bundled with some of
their 5.25" floppy
drives)
Never heard of that. I just can't remember what drives I seen used
around 1990
but I do know the hacked into to DOS to give you very large drives for the time.
I think 8K sectors rather than 512 sectors under standard DOS.
Ben alias woodelf.
5:59 p.m.
New subject: Micropolis
> Micropolis made excellent floppy drives. It is
too bad that their hard
> drives sucked.
> Did anybody ever use their OS? (bundled with some of their 5.25" floppy
> drives)
On Mon, 19 Nov 2007, woodelf wrote:
Never heard of that.
It came in a white loose-leaf binder, with 5.25" floppy disk in 1979
I just can't remember what drives I seen used
around 1990
but I do know the hacked into to DOS to give you very large drives for the time.
I think 8K sectors rather than 512 sectors under standard DOS.
Changing the sector
size was one of the simplest ways to get around some
of the DOS size limits. For example, MS-DOS through version 3.30 was
limited to a maximum of 65,536 sectors on a logical drive (which is the
source of the 32MB limit)
The 2GB limit was due to MICROS~1 using a signed, rather than unsigned,
long integer. 'Course that did make it possible to have a file with
-2147483648 bytes :-)
8:36 p.m.
New subject: Micropolis
On Monday 19 November 2007 17:59, Fred Cisin wrote:
The 2GB limit was due to MICROS~1 using a signed,
rather than unsigned,
long integer. 'Course that did make it possible to have a file with
-2147483648 bytes :-)
Having bumped into that limit at times, it made next to zero sense to me that
some programmer couldn't take the trouble to type "unsigned" in front
of "int" for that particular bit of code...
Grr!
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
8:54 p.m.
New subject: Micropolis
> The 2GB limit was due to MICROS~1 using a signed,
rather than unsigned,
> long integer. 'Course that did make it possible to have a file with
> -2147483648 bytes :-)
On Mon, 19 Nov 2007, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
Having bumped into that limit at times, it made next
to zero sense to me that
some programmer couldn't take the trouble to type "unsigned" in front
of "int" for that particular bit of code...
Grr!
1) "That number (2147483647) is soo big that nobody would ever need more
than that!"
2) Some of the earlier compilers didn't have an "unsigned long int"
3) What happens if you copy a -2G file to an otherwise almost full disk?
20 Nov
20 Nov
12:37 p.m.
New subject: Micropolis
On Monday 19 November 2007 20:54, Fred Cisin wrote:
That sorta reminds me of a fairly well-known quote about 640K...
> The 2GB
limit was due to MICROS~1 using a signed, rather than unsigned,
> long integer. 'Course that did make it possible to have a file with
> -2147483648 bytes :-)
On Mon, 19 Nov 2007, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
Having bumped into that limit at times, it made
next to zero sense to me
that some programmer couldn't take the trouble to type "unsigned" in
front of "int" for that particular bit of code...
Grr!
1) "That number (2147483647) is soo big that nobody would ever need more
than that!" 2) Some of the earlier compilers didn't have an
"unsigned long int"
Broken tools are still broken.
3) What happens if you copy a -2G file to an otherwise
almost full disk?
Beats me.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
2:54 p.m.
New subject: Micropolis
> 1) "That number (2147483647) is soo big that
nobody would ever need more
> than that!"
On Tue, 20 Nov 2007, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
That sorta reminds me of a fairly well-known quote
about 640K...
some statements will inevitably keep recurring. Lots of people apply
Moore's law to the past, but rarely look forward with it in planning
products.
2) Some of the
earlier compilers didn't have an "unsigned long int"
Broken tools are
still broken. 3) What
happens if you copy a -2G file to an otherwise almost full disk?
Beats me. 
21 Nov
21 Nov
3:28 p.m.
New subject: Micropolis
Fred Cisin wrote:
The 2GB limit was due to MICROS~1 using a signed,
rather than unsigned,
long integer. 'Course that did make it possible to have a file with
-2147483648 bytes :-)
That was actually how some "disk expansion" software worked. They put a
file in the filesystem with some negative size. The software functioned
on the principle that, "there's a sucker born every minute".
Peace... Sridhar
19 Nov
19 Nov
6:09 p.m.
New subject: Micropolis
On 19 Nov 2007 at 15:47, woodelf wrote:
I remember seeing it, but not having the time or inclination to check
it out.
Lots of vendors were increasing the block size in MS-DOS to support
large partitions around the same time. The problem was that it broke
a lot of things (many utilities expected 512 byte sectors and got
very upset (i.e. crashed) if things were otherwise) and was hideously
inefficient for small files. An approach that some used was to
employ the DOS network redirector and implement a private filesystem
on the large drive and map it as a network drive, which seems to work
a bit better.
Cheers,
Chuck
Did anybody
ever use their OS? (bundled with some of their 5.25" floppy
drives)
Never heard of that. I just can't remember what drives I seen used
around 1990
but I do know the hacked into to DOS to give you very large drives for the time.
I think 8K sectors rather than 512 sectors under standard DOS. 
20 Nov
20 Nov
11:27 p.m.
New subject: Micropolis (was: "intelligent" disk drives
On 11/19/07 3:58 PM, "Fred Cisin" <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
Micropolis made excellent floppy drives. It is too
bad that their hard
drives sucked.
Did anybody ever use their OS? (bundled with some of their 5.25" floppy
drives)
A few years ago I picked up an old laser show IMSAI 8080 system with
Micropolis 5.25" drives and this OS (MDOS). It came with editor and
assembler programs, so I've run it a couple of times to create an assembly
language program to transfer the contents of the hard sectored floppies over
serial line to a terminal program on my Mac for archiving. There were
several included subroutines for accessing the drive that made the job
easier.
Richard Lynch
19 Nov
19 Nov
5:18 p.m.
On 19 Nov 2007 at 13:52, dwight elvey wrote:
I suspect that bad marketing decisions were made at
Micropolis,
like the ones that were made at HaL. Engineering didn't have there
act to gether before the products were in production. I've
seen it happen at otherplaces. Schedule is king and at some
point the engineers will just stand and nod their heads ( as
they get their resumes ready ).
Well, at least they didn't ship you a brick when you ordered a hard
drive...
Cheers,
Chuck
(who actually likes Miniscribe drives much better than a lot of other
old brands).
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