[Coco] Fw: Help floppy drive

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

Roger Merchberger wrote:
> Rumor has it that Frank Pittel may have mentioned these words:
>> Was there ever a 720K 5.25 floppy drive?
> 
> Many! One computer (of many) that shipped with them standard would the 
> Tandy 2000 series computers.... sometimes they're (erroneously) refered 
> to as "quad density" - erroneously because density generally refers to 
> the #/size of bits & sectors per track - and 720K drives were stored the 
> same amount of data per track as 360K drives, but had double the # of 
> tracks.

Also, certainly here in the UK anyway, switchable 40/80 track drives 
where pretty common, especially with Acron BBC users, I used one of 
those on my Dragon for a while before migrating to 3.5"

> There's also been 2.8" & 3.0" micro-diskette sizes, and don't even get 
> me started on the 8" drives... Altho I have a box of those, I've never 
> had a computer that uses them.

Again 3" disks where pretty common over here on the Amstrad machines 
line the PPC6128 and the PCW series, odd things, belt driven drives 
(like the first Tandon IBM 5.25s), but unlike any other disks (by design 
at least), to use side 2 you had to take the disk out and turn it over 
(as you would with a cassette). Of course being belt driven the couple 
of machines I have with these drives in have given up the ghost due to 
perished belts :(

Cheers.

Phill.

-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.