Free: Stack of Victor or Sirius floppy disks

[Tony Duell]

> It depends on the machine and the configuration. IIRC, the earlier 

Yes, you're right. The only Mac I have any real hardware experience of is 
the Mac+. IIRC, you can use a 400K drive with that using a all-pins-wired 
ribbon cable, but if you use the standard 800K drive, you need a cable 
with 1 or 2 pins open.

> machines had regular 20 pin cables, but then certain combinations of 
> disk drive and computer needed the "yellow stripe" cable, as opposed to 
> the "red stripe" one. > 

> I also seem to remember something about pin 9 needing to be 
> disconnected as well, but I can't for the life of me remember what that 
> was. 

I think one of the pins was a -ve power supply rail (-5V? -12V?) 
 
> A similar trick was needed to use an 800k drive on a machine with a 
> SuperDrive controller (MacII, etc) 

Right... this is something to be aware if you're working on such 
machines. I am so used to seening IDC ribbon cabels where all pins are 
wired and where there are no 'dummies' in calbe that I was very suppised 
when I figured out what the Apple drvie cables were doing.

-tony