Re: The Apple ][ was cool!

[Roy Miller <millers@inebraska.com>]

william strutts wrote:

> "sands-of-iowa" <sands@cableone.com> wrote in message
> tm5e19fpg2qs5d@corp.supernews.com">news:tm5e19fpg2qs5d@corp.supernews.com...
> >
> > Didn't apple "roll their own floppy controller because no one had a floppy
> > drive for the home market at that time all the other computer makers were
> > useing tape?instead for cost.
> >
> Nope. The controllers existed when Woz designed his controller
> but the cost would have been prohibitive.  He thought he knew
> of a better way to get the cost down and get more data on the
> drive than was standard at the time.

Your answer misses one point in his question: "for the home market". He's right
there, and you're right about the cost. The fact is though, that the Disk ][
was a BIG money maker for Apple, as it cost them very little, and though they
sold them for hundreds less than other companies, they  were still making
hundreds on each sale. Not a bad way to avoid the poor house.

Roy

>
>
> From Apple History site:
> "Other issues that Wozniak had to deal with involved a way to
> properly time the reading and writing of information to the disk. IBM
> used a complex hardware-based circuit to achieve this
> synchronization. Wozniak, after studying how IBM's drive worked,
> realized that if the data was written to the disk in a different fashion,
> all that circuitry was unneeded. Many floppy disks sold at that time
> were "hard sectored", meaning that they had a hole punched in the
> disk near the center ring. This hole was used by the disk drive
> hardware to identify what section of the disk was passing under the
> read/write head at any particular time. Wozniak's technique would
> allow the drive to do self-synchronization ("soft sectoring"), not have
> to deal with that little timing hole, and save on hardware."
> http://apple2history.org/history/ah05.html
> --
> --
> William R. Strutts - wrstrutts1@nospam.home.com - Whatever!
>
> C'est moi!  http://www.facelink.com/wrstrutts
>
> Just hacking away...
>
> Remove nospam to reply.