Media interchange sillinesss (Was: floppy controller IC (was Re:

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Thu Sep 30 14:39:53 1999

Well. . . it wouldn't have made much sense for the folks who made media to
admit that they were merely charging more for the media marked
"double-sided" when they were alike in every other way. It seemed that the
only real difference in many cases was that some diskettes simply were
priced higher.

The old 8" drives required you punch holes in the appropriate places and
cover the old ones if you used "single-sided" media in a 2-sided drive,
having punched the hole, which was the only difference.

Since they were available, this swapping of media from one application to
another happened all the time where I did much of my work back in the
mid-80's, and I'm not referring to merely a few dozen of each drive type, as
we were testing and qualifying drives by the thousands. That was pretty
boring work and, seeing lots of different media, it became obvious when
there really wasn't a difference other than the label.

Dick


-----Original Message-----
From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Thursday, September 30, 1999 11:55 AM
Subject: Re: Media interchange sillinesss (Was: floppy controller IC (was
Re:


>Fascinating stuff, the old "HD/DD/SD" debate rages even today. Fortunately
>half of the conversation gets filtered on this end.
>
>Fred's absolutely correct.
>
>I can add only one Factoid that was true in 1986 which was that Sony and
>Verbatim had both admitted that they were only made double sided diskette
>media and the single sided disks were in fact double sided capable. But
>_nobody_ ever claimed they used a single emulsion for both HD and DD disks.
>For formats where the emulsion was the same for SD vs DD disks they did use
>the same media.
>
>--Chuck
Received on Thu Sep 30 1999 - 14:39:53 BST