Re: AEHD drive

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

John Townsend <utownje@lexis-nexis.com> wrote:

>Wayne Stewart wrote:
>
>> Unfortunately the only way to do that is to connect it to a SuperDrive
>> controller. It's a pity in a way that Apple didn't adapt this format and
>> went for the more PC compatible 1,44mb. If they had a lot more
>> Apple IIs would likely sport HD drives.
>
>Strange, I always thought the reverse was true, and that it was AE who
>dropped the ball with that drive.  They considered it more important (and
>even touted it in their advertising at the time, as I recall) to have an
>extra .16MB of storage on a removable floppy than to have any hope of
>interchangability with Macs and PCs.  Your experience may be different, but
>I think the number of times that that little bit of extra space on a PC or
>Mac floppy would've done me any good is near zero, but I take advantage of
>the PC/Mac/A2 compatibility of the 1.44MB format on an almost daily basis.
>I can save Apple software on a PC floppy here at work, which I then take
>home and read on my Mac or A2 machines, or vice versa.  Ironically, I can
>even use my SuperDrives with my AE PC Transporter, but an AEHD drive would
>be practically useless with it.  Maybe if AE had had the foresight to make
>their drives compatible with existing standards (at a price point that
>surely would've been better than Apple's), rather than just try to make them
>look a little better on paper, it would have had a more successful product
>(and company).

It was not AE's fault.  The IIGS and early Mac had IWM controllers
which could not encode in MFM.  GCR is 800k and 1.6MB.  MFM
is 720k and 1.44MB.  When Apple later capitulated to the PC
world and switched to MFM, they had to make a new controller
for Macs, the SWIM.  They provided the capability for Apple II
users via the SuperDrive (SWIM based) card.

AE's drive is fine.  It will do 1.44MB with a SuperDrive card (which
has a SWIM chip).  But without it, the best AE could do was
1.6MB GCR with the built in IWM chip of the IIGS.

If Macs dominated the marketplace in the 1980s instead of the
PC, then things would be different.  Apple might have been the
first with high density and it most certainly would have been
GCR and hence 1.6MB.  It might then have been the PC that
would have abandoned MFM encoding and adopted the 1.6MB
GCR format, even though their old 720k format was MFM.