Re: Floppy Interfaces

["Paul Grammens" <grammens@svn.net>]

Simon Biber <xbiber@bigpond.net.au> wrote

>
> Can you give me a link to the FAQ you are talking about please? You mean
the
> CSA2 FAQ or the DISK II FAQ or what?
>
> This is an Apple 5.25" Drive which is a platinum version of the Unidisk
> 5.25"... Is it really worth anything?
>

Oops, I didn't realize there was a 5.25" drive also called a Unidisk.  I
thought you were referring to the 800K Unidisk. Here's the info from the
CSA2 faq, hot from Rubywand's website:
*********************
From: Benjamin Summers

021- What is a "UniDisk"?

     The UniDisk 5.25 was Apple's replacement for the venerable Disk ][. It
featured an updated design, tan color plastic case, a DB-19 cable, and
daisy-chain port on the back to which other drives could be connected. The
case
color was later changed to platinum and the drive was rechristened to the
"Apple 5.25 Drive".

     The UniDisk 3.5 was Apple's first 3.5" drive for the Apple II line.
Like
the Unidisk 5.25, it had the DB-19 cable and daisy chain port on back.
UniDisk
3.5 was dropped in favor of the Apple Disk 3.5, a different design, at the
time
of the launch of the IIgs.

----------------------------------


From: Mitchell Spector

     One important difference you forgot to mention: The UniDisk 3.5 was an
"intelligent" drive, whereas the Apple 3.5 was a "dumb" drive. There was a
specialized circuit board inside the UniDisk 3.5 drive which had its own
processor, memory, IWM controller and firmware. This was needed for the
file://c, in
order for the drive to process data before sending it on to the machine
(which
was too slow to do the job by itself). You can easily spot a UniDisk 3.5 as
it
matched the snow-white color of the file://c and had its access LED and
eject button
_above_ the disk insert slot (the Apple 3.5 has them in-line).






> I'm not going to break it for the purpose of connecting to the Mac Plus
> anyway.
>
> Simon.
>
>