[Coco] Fw: Help floppy drive

Joel Ewy jcewy at swbell.net
Thu Apr 12 23:07:06 EDT 2007


L. Curtis Boyle wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:59:53 -0600, Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net> 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.
>>
>> And that's not even counting things like those oddball Superdrives that
>> could put something like 32M on an ordinary 1.4M floppy...
>
> Having used several 2.88 MB drives here at work, they were NOT very
> reliable (at least, whatever brand we had wasn't... they tended to
> scramble way more often than 720K or 1.44 MB (3.5" we are talking
> about here).
>
> I actually had a USB "superdrive" (read/wrote 720K, 1.44MB and special
> 20MB floppies) here at work, and it was actually more reliable than
> the 2.88 (probably because of the laser to guide the head). Later, I
> think they got up to 120MB on a floppy, didn't they?
>
Here's a Wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk )
about the LS-120 SuperDisk, which is what I was thinking about.  The
LS-240 variant could apparently put 32M on an ordinary 1.44M disk, but
you had to erase and re-write the entire disk if you changed anything.

JCE
>
> --L. Curtis Boyle
>
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