On 4/22/05, Vintage Computer Festival <vcf at siconic.com> wrote: The IIgs does use more desk space, and it uses a heck of a larger volume. The IIc is also slightly more stylish. Yeah, I've been thinking about going this route too. It even sounds like the CF adapter will run on unenhanced IIe's these day. But I've always felt weird using an Apple II with a hard drive. Sure it can be done, and there are many ways of doing so, but most of the 8-bit software fits on a couple of 180 kB floppies. As for the games, some of which use many more diskettes, it would be surprising if many of them would run from a hard drive.

Sellam wrote: Well, for what passed as "large capacity" at the time. Back then, the common 5.25-inch drives were 5MB and 10MB. When the Apple III operating system SOS was being developed (1979 or so), it was designed to support up to 32MB disks. The decision was not so much because 32MB was a target, but because 2^16 blocks of 512 bytes each works out to 32MB. The block number can be conveniently stored in two bytes. That was before any 5.25-inch disks had been introduced, so at the time hard drives were generally 8-inch or 14-inch, and were very expensive. In 1981 the ST506 5MB 5.25-inch drive was introduced at a price of around $1000 (not including a controller, which was also expensive). Other drive vendors followed suit shortly thereafter, and Apple introduced the Profile 5MB drive for use on the Apple III. If I recall correctly, the initiall list price of the Profile was somewhere between $2500 and $3500. It had an internal controller, and only needed a simple parallel interface card in the computer. About two years later, ProDOS was introduced. It inherited the SOS file system design, thus sharing the same 32MB limit. At the time, 5MB and 10MB drives were common, and 20MB drives were starting to appear. Clearly there wasn't very much headroom. Eric