Re: IIe, IIgs, Mac LC-II hardware compatibility questions.

[david@uow.edu.au (David Wilson)]

"Paul Grammens" <grammens@svn.net> writes:
>David Empson <dempson@actrix.gen.nz> wrote
>> The UniDisk 3.5 is a "smart" drive.  Its interface board is actually a
>> small microcomputer, containing a 65C02 processor, RAM, ROM and an IWM
>> chip (the same disk controller used in the IIc, IIgs and early Mac
>> models).  The UniDisk 3.5 communicates with the host computer using a
>> packetised protocol called SmartPort: data is transferred between the
>> host computer and memory within the drive's computer, and is then
>> written to the disk (or vice versa for read).  This extra step (and the
>> slower transfer rate) makes the UniDisk 3.5 slower than the other
>> drives.

>This is interesting, seems like it could be adapted for use with an external
>hard disk for the IIc.  Any speculation on that?

It was done. There was a 20MB hard drive for the Apple //c that had a
Smartport to SCSI adapter in the case (if I remember this correctly).

It would be a lot slower than SCSI but given the lack of slots in a //c
probably the best you can do.
--
David Wilson  School of IT & CS, Uni of Wollongong, Australia