"intelligent" disk drives

[Fred Cisin]

> >As an aside, IMHO one of the worst mistakes commodore made was that the
> >8050 could not at least read the disks of the earlier drives.

On Sat, 17 Nov 2007, M H Stein wrote:
> Sort of unavoidable because to get the 500MB/side they went to 100TPI drives.

Well, 96tpi drives would give pretty much the same capacity as 100tpi
ones, with only "half" as many incompatabilities.

'course, if they HAD gotten 500MB/side (v 400-500KB), then it would have
been well worth it.








>
> Not as big a problem then as it may be today, because the high price of
> the 8050/8250s tended to put them into a different market, mostly business
> and institutional, where price and compatibility with the smaller and cheaper
> units wasn't usually an issue. And of course the IEEE bus was compatible
> so you could easily convert among drives (until the serial versions came
> along) as long as you had one of the (also expensive) IEEE<>IEEE cables.
>
> m
>
>

--
Fred Cisin                      cisin at xenosoft.com
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