Re: The Apple ][ was cool!

["william strutts" <wrstrutts1@nospam.home.com>]

"Leonard Erickson" <shadow@krypton.rain.com> wrote in message
3B60C3ED.8603F7B7@krypton.rain.com">news:3B60C3ED.8603F7B7@krypton.rain.com...
> > Has anyone seen a 'standard' disk controller of that era? Those things
> > were enormous! Woz's little GRC wonder was a work of art. A cheap disk
> > drive system was one of the Apple II's greatest strengths.
>
> I have a system of the same vintage as the Apple II. It was used as a
> way to do data entry offline and then upload the resulting text to a
> time-sharing service. It uses a WD 1771 FDC *chip*. Which was available
> in 1977.
>
> It was *expensive*, not huge. The entire motherboard (8080 cpu, sockets
> for 8k of RAM and 8k of ROM, two serial ports and the floppy controller
> circuitry is about the size of a typical hardcover book cover. And it's
> not packed all that tightly.

Apple sold tons of their drives and cards for their machine due to
their lost cost and not because of its technical superiority.  I think
they never switched over to another type of drive controller was because of
the pure momentum of it just like Commodore and its C64 drives.
--
--
William R. Strutts - wrstrutts1@nospam.home.com - Whatever!

C'est moi!  http://www.facelink.com/wrstrutts

Just hacking away...

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