[Coco] Fw: Help floppy drive

Phill Harvey-Smith afra at aurigae.demon.co.uk
Thu Apr 12 19:16:41 EDT 2007


Joel Ewy wrote:
> And don't forget 2.88M.  I sort of understand why those never caught on,
> but not quite.  I guess it was that they came out at about the same time
> as CD-ROMs, and while 2.88M floppies halve the number of disks you need
> to ship, CD-ROM (at the time) reduced it to one.  But still... You often
> still see support for it in the BIOS.  But you never see the drives or
> disks.  I've seen the drives in IBM PS/1 and PS/2 systems a few times.

Yeah we used to have a load of them at work, on old IBM PS/2 systems, I 
think we even have a box of 2.88MB disks somewhere :) The otehr system 
that could use these was the GoldCard/SuperGoldCard on the Sinclair QL, 
which could format them as 3.2MB :) extra sectors/track I guess.

> And that's not even counting things like those oddball Superdrives that
> could put something like 32M on an ordinary 1.4M floppy...

Do you mean LS120 drives, that could fit 120MB on a special disk, while 
it was the same form factor as a 1.44, it was definatly a different 
disk, we still have some of those at work too. This was around at the 
same time as the ZIP disk, late 90s-early 2000s, and had the advantage 
that the drives could also read and write standard 1.44s...

Cheers.

Phill.

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

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



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