Re: UniDisk 3.5" on a //e

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article shack@onyx.southwind.net (Randy Shackelford) writes...

>Well all bets are off when you talk stuff that isn't original. For instance,
>my 840av has a Sony floppy and a CD600, and no such boxes were factory made.
>There's also a ROM 3 signature edition on my desk. 

    Yep, I know what you mean. I have a ROM 3 'Woz' signature case on
my own desk, along with an SuperDrive upgraded 800K drive, and hooked
up to the system (via LocalTalk) is a Macintosh Plus with internal HD. 
Nothing like that is official stuff as shipped by Apple, but pretty
cool nonetheless.

>I wouldn't be able to venture a guess how many unidisks are out there. Since
>they were $500 plus $70 for the card back in the days, they weren't growing
>on trees. But plenty more sold than superdrive cards and drives I bet.

    Another reason SuperDrive and cards aren't that plentiful, beside
price (something like $400-500 for the drive and $150 for the card?),
was System Software during the time of its release. There was no such
thing has the HFS.FST for reading high density Mac disks, and there
certainly was no such thing as the MSDOS.FST for reading PC disks.

    In the end, you were paying several hundred dollars just to have
an extra 640K of floppy storage. Most people at the time just bought
SCSI hardrives instead, which held countless times more, were faster
and actually made a IIgs useable (can't say the same for a 1.44 MB
floppy drive). I don't think the MSDOS.FST and MS-DOS Utilities came
out in until after the drive and card were discontinued. The most
useful thing about a SuperDrive is allowing you to read/write MS-DOS
floppies (HD HFS floppies too, but then you could always read 800K
HFS disks with the standard IIgs drive--that's allowed me to share
data with Mac's for years).

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca