Lisa floppy problems

From: Marion Bates <Marion.Bates_at_Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: Tue Sep 15 15:21:15 1998

--- Eric Smith wrote:
Marion.Bates_at_Dartmouth.EDU (Marion Bates) wrote:
> As far as I know, it is the same in almost all respects, right down =
> to the model number. But, the Lisa version supports the Lisa's =
> auto-eject feature when shutting down from the front button, =
> whereas the Mac version does not.

No, they are in fact identical, and have auto-eject. The eject when the
white "power" button on the Lisa is pressed is done by software; the button
doesn't really have anything to do with the power supply.

Eric
--- end of quote ---

I asked David Craig about this, and here's what he had to say:

"Concerning your recent question about the differences between the Mac
and Lisa 400k drives as pertaining to auto eject at machine shutdown, my
understanding is the Lisa drive has extra circuitry to detect when its
power is turned off and it then auto ejects the floppy. The Mac drive
does not have this extra circuitry and therefore does not auto eject a
floppy by itself. The Mac floppy ejection is controlled by the system
software.

See Sun's Lisa repair manual which talks about this feature.

FWIW, the Lisa drive being smarter does not suprise me since the Lisa
hardware philosophy was to have specific components handle specific
tasks. That's why the Lisa twiggy drives were smart and did stuff like
formatting whereas the Mac handles everything about the disk. The
Lisa's keyboard was also smart and had its own chip to control it --
COPS, control oriented processing system."

-- MB
Received on Tue Sep 15 1998 - 15:21:15 BST