Help! need 400k/800k Mac os 6 or 7 diskettes!

From: Ian Primus <ian_primus_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Mon Oct 6 20:04:51 2003

On Monday, October 6, 2003, at 07:11 PM, chris wrote:

>> IIRC, you could no longer use 400k disks as of System 7.6, but you can
>> still use 800k disks up through System 9, provided of course that you
>> have a Mac with an internal floppy drive.
>
> I can't reliably read or write 800K disks in my PM 6500 with OS 9.0.4.
> Haven't been able to for a few OS versions. Also can't in my PM 9600.
> It
> attempts it, and is sometimes works for reading an 800K disk. It can
> also
> on occasion write to 800K disks, but it can never format them. It will
> attempt a format, it will even complete it without complaint... but the
> disk will be undreadable in machines running older OS versions. If I
> format in an older machine, I can then get a few writes to the disk
> before the data is unreadable in an older machine (and if the disk is
> freshly formatted, then I can usually get one or two reads as well).
>
One thing I have noticed is that the newer manual inject floppy drives
aren't as good at writing 800k disks. I have had some that worked
perfectly, and others that weren't as great. For the longest time I
used a rather hacked Centris 610 running System 8, and I had no
problems writing 800k disks, and I used them a lot. The Centris had an
auto inject floppy drive. I also haven't had very many problems with
800k disks on my 9600, but I do occasionally get errors. The disks are
still useable in the old machines though. Maybe your drive is wearing
out?

>> Why Apple stopped
>> offering floppy drives, I don't know.
>
> Cost cutting. They were trying to get the iMac down to as cheap a build
> as possible, and they knew that most consumers would have little need
> for
> a floppy drive in the long run. So it was a place to shave a few bucks
> off the manufacturing costs. Alas when they choose to do it, it was
> still
> a tad premature, as yes, in the LONG run, most consumers wouldn't need
> a
> floppy drive... but until they migrated their entire collection of old
> disks to something else, then they still needed it (but its a typical
> catch-22... if Apple left the drive in, no consumer would migrate their
> stuff in anticipation for the removal of the drive, so the consumer
> wasn't going to stop needing the drive, until right after the drive was
> no longer there)
>
Good point, but the biggest problem with the original iMac was that
there was no way to get your work off the computer if you didn't have
an internet connection or any extra hardware, since they only had CD
readers, not burners. I have never owned an iMac, but I have friends
who have them, and they all waited until the iMac had a CD burner...

Ian Primus
ian_primus_at_yahoo.com
Received on Mon Oct 06 2003 - 20:04:51 BST