The List!

From: Roger Merchberger <zmerch_at_northernway.net>
Date: Sun May 4 22:42:21 1997

Whilst in a self-induced trance, Steven J. Feinsmith happened to blather:
>Susan M Johnson wrote:

>> Currently, the H/Z-100 can run 8", 5 1/4" (40 & 96 tpi), and 3 1/2" (96
>> & 135 tpi) floppy disk drives; MFM hard drives (also RLL, although not
>> common), tape drives, and SCSI drives. CD-ROM drives are also possible.
>
>During days of H/Z-110 and 120... there are only two floppy disk drives,
>5.25" and 8". The 8" system was short lived. There was never using
>3.5"
>but some people successful attempted this way when H/Z-100 were no
>longer
>in market. They have to write a special software included BIOS to work
>with 3.5" drive. SCSI system on H/Z-110 or 120 was very rarely. Those
>days it was called SASI. There was never using tape drive or CD-ROM
>drives
>because H/Z-110 or 120 never use with IDE or EIDE. But it can use with
>SCSI based interfaced.

I have a few comments on what each of you said:

Steven: Notice that Susan wrote "Currently," at the beginning of the
sentance. That means that altho the 3.5" disk drives weren't available at
the time of the machine's introduction, you can easily get any machine that
uses the standard 34-pin floppy interface to use a 3.5" disk drive. I
currently use 3.5" drives on both my Atari 800 and my Tandy Color Computer
3, neither of which had 3.5" drives available at the time of their
introduction. Provided you were replacing an 80TkDSDD 5.25" (or lesser)
drive with an 80TkDSDD 3.5" drive, you would not need a new BIOS, as the
drives are electrically equivilant.

Steven: Also, SASI and SCSI are *different*, SASI being the precursor of
SCSI. Altho they are *somewhat* compatible IIRC, SCSI did have extra
features that could not be used with a SASI interface.

Susan: You're sentance above is slightly misleading, however, as there were
no 96tpi 3.5" drives that I've ever heard of (and I own some *weird* ones!)
Everything from the 200K SSSD Tandy Portable Disk Drive 2 (used for Tandy's
*early* non-MSDOS laptops) right on up to the 2.88Meg ED drives are 135TPI.

Hope this helps!
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger Merchberger       | If at first you don't succeed,
Programmer, NorthernWay | nuclear warhead disarmament should *not*
zmerch_at_northernway.net  | be your first career choice.
Received on Sun May 04 1997 - 22:42:21 BST

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