>OK, these drives are non-stnadard enough that you can't plug them
>straight into a PC's floppy controller. But that's not really what I was
>talking about. Thing is, I can take a floppy disk from one of the HP
>units, put it in a PC drive, and read/write to it using the right
>software. There is no way a PC can read an original Apple Mac disk.
Considering that all Mac's made after January 1989 came with
a 1.4meg floppy vice the original 400k/800k drive, I'd say that Apple
saw it's error with the original drives and corrected it. Everything
starting with the SE/30 and IIx has the 1.4meg and in fact Apple
dropped support in the OS for dealing with the earlier format in
System 8.X. That's one reason I keep my PM 6100 around running
System 7.5.5, so that I can still create the images and disks of
those.
>I still think the correct solution to that is to use a bigger case. I
>have never understood this love of making things small, especially not
>when there are good technical reasons not to do so.
They were trying for a completely different market with the
compact Mac's. Their size was meant to make them less formidable to
the new computer user. Even my wife, who hasn't touched a computer
in a number of years, and who then only used a pre-made boot disk to
go directly into a terminal program, saw my Color Classic and stopped
to look at it and and called it 'cute'. I like larger cases with
expandability myself, but the overall design of the compact Mac's has
to be given credit for being the solid design that it is.
>I have a CP/M machine with a SASI interface (forerunner of SCSI, and
>essentailly the same pinout).
My take on that would be that a CP/M machine, at the same
period in time, with a SASI or SCSI interface would've been bought
for business use though. Other than someone heavy into tinkering
with the hardware, not many people would've spent the money for one
for home use. As it is, enough other manufacturers used the same
DB25 connector on that era's SCSI inplementations.
My point in all this is that yes, Apple has done some strange
things over the years, some of which have been pet peeves of mine
since before I started using Mac's (inability to format non-Apple
SCSI hard disks!), and they've produced a few lemons (52-5300 and
62-6300 series PowerMacs) but overall they are very solid machines.
For instance, the cases on the Blue/white G3 and G4 towers are almost
works of art. HP, Compaq, Tandy, IBM and nearly all of your major PC
vendors have themselves done things inconsistent or incompatible with
the rest of the industry as well at varios times, so it's not just
Apple that tries to pull one over on the user on occasion. I found
it hillarious when Tandy introduced IDE in the 1000-series but made
it 8bit vice the normal 16bit, which in turn meant that it was
compatible with all of four hard disks at the time (2 from Seagate, 2
from Western Digital) and none over 40meg! The Tandy 1000 series
though taken as a whole accomplished what it was meant to do and was
quite successful. It had excellent name recognition into the early
90's.
Jeff
--
Collector of Classic Microcomputers and Video Game Systems:
Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757
Received on Sun Mar 25 2001 - 12:33:28 BST