On 1998-03-17 classiccmp_at_u.washington.edu said to lisard_at_zetnet.co.uk
:[Compact Floppy Disks]
:> those'll be the things amstrad used ad nauseam, yep? you can post
:Yes. Also used on the Tatung Einstein (now that's a machine I've
:not seen mentioned lately), the Oric and probably others that I've
:forgotten.
oh, the einsteins were cute. :> similar hardware to the memotech, from
your description - including that regrettable decision to use the
tms9918 for the display. those things are just not *good*...
:At one time you could get 3" disks drives for about \pounds 30.00
:in the UK (when all other drives were over \pounds 100.00). I
:bought one and put it as a second drive on my CoCo system - the
:extra storage was very useful when running OS-9, and it didn't
:matter that the disks weren't standard.
unfortunately, the cost of other drives (and of disks) plummeted in the
uk and the cost of the disks for the 3" remained high. that's probably
what killed them, that and the proprietary nature of them (they may not
have been intended as proprietary, but they seem to have ended up that
way). and we can well believe that they were superior in quality.
compared with the modern 3.5" disk, most things are...
:Actually the design of the disk is vastly superior to the 3.5" one.
:The metal shutter on the 3" disk is inside the case and is opened
:by a slider on one edge. On the 3.5" disk the shutter can be easily
:opened accidentally, and more importantly it can spring apart on
:the inside edge.
we've travelled that road...
:One thing that people didn't like about the 3" disks was that they
:were flippies - you turned them over to read the second side - at
:least on most Amstrad machines. But there are real 2-head 3" drives
:- I have some, along with the manual.
not the one that was the second disk on a pcw8512. that was 80-track
double-sided. what people *really* didn't like about them was paying 3
quid for a disk when they could see 3.5" disks around for 3 quid for a
box. that'd annoy us, and amstrad weren't really clued up to it.
:A TI 9927 (I think - the PAL version of the 9918) video chip + 16K
:video memory
*shakes head again*
--
Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling
you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...
Received on Wed Mar 18 1998 - 17:57:11 GMT