Re: Anybody aware of the description of a 19pin connector of an Apple 5.25 Disk Drive ?

[Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca>]

On Mon, 6 May 2013, Phil Tubb wrote:


> As it turns out, the Disk II design was vastly inferior to the 
> prevailing designs of the day, except in a few specs. (1) it was a lot 
> cheaper. That was good for Apple, but they sold it at a huge markup, so 
> it wasn't much cheaper than the other designs (which at that time, were 
> largely for S-100 systems like the Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080 I just 
> mentioned).

I think a lot of the "Great Design" revolves around the simplicity.  Take 
things off the floppy drive, and then the actual controller becomes so 
much simpler.  That seems so contradictory.  But it's just looked at by 
itself.

If you look at 1977, then it was a good choice probably.  I remember the 
TTL level controllers in Byte. or the Ohio Scientific disk controller that 
used a USART and plenty of other ICs to do the work, or even the first 
wave of floppy disk controller ICs that still required lots of work.

But as you say, adding a floppy disk to the Apple II was not cheap, though 
I'm not sure considering the cost of floppy drives if it wasn't somewhat 
cheaper.

But, it didn't take long before there were better floppy disk controller 
ICs.  Less external circuitry needed and then later virtually none.  That 
shifts things.  But  Apple was stuck with their system, so everyone had to 
buy Apple drives unless they were willing to modify the drive (and at the 
time, I don't remember seeing anything about that, though I never really 
read Apple specific magazines back then).  The cost of the standard drives 
dropped constantly, and then you could buy 3.5" drives that were cheap.

So the neat design was only valuable for a short period, after which it 
became a liability.

I was given a Mac Plus in the fall of 1993, it had a bad connector to the 
deflection yokes.  Once I just soldered the wires, rather than using the 
connector, it was fine.

But there I was with a free Mac Plus and only one floppy drive.  A second 
floppy drive would have cost quite a bit.  I ended up with my first hard 
drive because I couldn't live with one floppy drive and the hard drive 
wasn't really that much more than a new 3.5" floppy drive from Apple.

I'd already bought a 3.5" floppy for about 80.00 in 1989, by 1993 they 
were even cheaper, but because of the neat but non-standard drive, I 
couldn't use one of those.

So yes, a neat initial design that cost Apple less ended up costing the 
users more in the long run.

   Michael