thinking of the "ultimate" retro x86 PCs - what bits to seek/keep ?

[Fred Cisin]

On Thu, 2 Jun 2016, Swift Griggs wrote:
> I'll probably put in a SCSI ZIP drive and a combo 3.5" / 5 1/4" drive if I
> go with a big honkin' case. If not, I'll just do a 3.5" floppy if I gotta
> choose. I wonder if any of those "big floppy" style drives supported
> standard 3.5" floppies, too? Didn't the old LS120 and Sony HiFD do
> backwards support of older 1.44MB floppies, too?

MOST of the "2.88M" drives (2.81MiB) drives could also do 1.4M; same FDC 
but needed device driver and twice the data transfer rate for 2.8M.
And the "Floptical"s; SCSI!  20M on a 3.5" sized disk!

>> No CD.
Why no CD-ROM?  2/3G storage; SCSI or proprietary interfaces, even 
parallel port adapters.   Unless you created your own software, required 
MS-DOS 3.10 or above.  CD-ROM was less work for installing Windoze 
3.10/3.11 than a couple dozen floppies.