Re: 8" disk for Apple II Question

["Charles Stephens" <charles_stephens@hotmail.com>]

Shugart?  I think they were the de facto standard of the era.  Good luck
finding the drives or the media.

cfs

"Paul Schlyter" <pausch@saaf.se> wrote in message
news:9f618v$nb3$1@merope.saaf.se...
>
> > Mark Cummings <NOTfigjams@primus.com.au> wrote:
> >
> >> I am just curious to know if the was ever an 8" floppy disk
> >> drive made for the Apple II.
>
> Yes, there was.  A former job of mine got an Apple II in the early
> 1980'es and then added a pair of 8" floppy drives, mostly because
> they offered about 500K disk size as compared to the 140K of the
> standard Apple II disk drives.  This Apple II was used to record
> data from photometers in a research lab.
>
> These 8" drives were MFM drives, and had a special disk controller
> card inserted into the Apple II.  The software coming with these disk
> drives supported Apple DOS 3.3 and Apple (Softcard) CP/M.  They were
> quite expensive, too expensive for me to get them for myself.
>
> However, I had good use for these 8" floppy drives also for my own
> Apple II: besides its own 500K format, those 8" drives also read
> standard 8" SSSD floppy disk (the only standard floppy disk format
> which ever existed in the CP/M world).  Earlier, when buying CP/M
> software I had to try to get ot on Apple CP/M disks, but from now on
> I could order it on standard 8" SSSD disks and then transfer the
> files to Apple II disks on that machine, so I could use it on my own
> Apple II.  I ended up buying about ten 8" SSSD disks like that, and I
> still have them (although I no longer have access to any equipment
> which can read them).
>
> Unfortunately I don't remember the brand of these 8" floppy drives
> for the Apple II.  But I can assure you that they did exist.
>
> --
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> Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
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