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

[barrym95838 <barrym95838@yahoo.com>]

On Monday, May 6, 2013 4:09:01 PM UTC-7, Phil Tubb wrote:
> 
> Sorry, I have to disagree. While the Disk II design is very clever in terms of minimizing chip count, in every other respect it is unusually bad. Personally, I've designed professional duplication equipment for pretty much every floppy disk format ever developed, including a unit with the world record for copying speed. If you want to see a brilliant design, look at the Amiga disk controller.
> 
[...]
> 
> Bottom line, the Apple Disk II design was clever in that it had a low chip count and was cheap to manufacture, but it suffered very badly in all other respects compared to just using the regular FM/MFM design with the standard floppy controller chips. How anyone could claim it was faster than the S-100 floppy drives of the same period is beyond me... obviously they never tried them side-by-side.

Oops, you're correct, Phil.  I have no experience with S-100 designs; I was speaking from my limited TRS-80, Commodore, Atari, and Apple experiences.  Since you clearly have at least an order of magnitude more knowledge than I on the subject, I humbly concede to the majority of your points.

Take care,

Mike