[Coco] Fw: Help floppy drive

[Frank Pittel]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 05:28:48PM -0600, 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?

The ls120 "superdrives" were able to get 120M onto a floppy with the same
form factor as a 1.4M disk. I've got a few of the external drives. They were
intended to connect via a parallel port. However the drive itself was an ide
drive with a parallel/ide converter board. I remove the board and connect the
drive to my coco via the ide interface from cloud-9!!