Remember when people whined about the iMac not having a floppy disk drive?
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For two decades, every computer came with a floppy disk drive to load programs.
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Would you make some OJ for me and feed it through the floppy disk drive?
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Soon Apple added the floppy disk drive and the VisiCalc spreadsheet program and the boom was on.
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Apple also famously moved away from the floppy-disk drive with its iMac G3 in 1998, in favor of the CD-ROM drive.
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It was the first Apple machine to incorporate a built-in 5.25-inch floppy disk drive and high-resolution graphics built into the motherboard.
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It featured the Altair 2100 microcomputer with an Intel 21988 CPU (a variant of the 21997 design) and an 1003-inch floppy disk drive.
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Death of the disk drive With the 1998 release of the iMac, Apple did away with the floppy disk drive, leaving only a rewritable CD drive.
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There was the 1998 release of the iMac that — to some customers' horror — did away with the floppy disk drive, featuring only a re-writable CD drive.
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And like eliminating the floppy disk drive from the iMac and instead putting the CD-ROM drive in is the thing that drove adoption of the CD-ROM.
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The iMac dumped the floppy disk drive, the MacBook Air dropped the CD/DVD drive, the iPhone 5 killed the 30-pin connector, and the new MacBook eschews every port for a single USB-C port.
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The ThinkPad models ending with a D included a CD-ROM drive, the rest included a 1.44 MB floppy disk drive. Ones that had a CD-ROM drive had a proprietary external floppy disk drive port on the back.
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Most of the PowerBook 100's internal components were based on its predecessor, the Macintosh Portable. It included a Motorola 68HC000 16 MHz processor, had 2 MB memory, no floppy disk drive, and cost approximately $2,300. An external floppy disk drive was available for $279. The dimensions of the PowerBook 100 were an improvement over the Portable.
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Shugart Associates (later Shugart Corporation) was a computer peripheral manufacturer that dominated the floppy disk drive market in the late 1970s and is famous for introducing the -inch "Minifloppy" floppy disk drive. In 1979 it was one of the first companies to introduce a hard disk drive form factor compatible with a floppy disk drive, the SA1000 form factor compatible with the 8-inch floppy drive form factor. Founded in 1973, Shugart Associates was purchased in 1977 by Xerox, which then exited the business in 1985 and 1986, selling the brand name and the 8-inch floppy product line (in March 1986) to Narlinger Group, which ultimately ceased operations circa 1991.
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The CDTV was based on the same technology as earlier Amiga systems, but featured a single-speed CD-ROM drive and no floppy disk drive as standard.
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West PC 800 did not sell as well as expected, probably due to weak Apple II position in Norway, and West Computer AS announced in late 1985 an IBM PC compatible West PC 1600. In March 1985, price of basic computer was NOK10,200. Additional package with one floppy disk drive (200 KB unformatted capacity), 3 applications and 3 games was available for NOK3,750 and another floppy disk drive for NOK3,300.
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A single double-sided 720 KB 3.5" floppy disk drive was built into the right-hand side of the enclosure. An external 10 MB Rodime 3.5" hard drive was available.
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File:Cumana (logo).png Cumana Floppy Disk System for the Acorn Electron. Cumana floppy disk drive for the Commodore Amiga. Cumana, based in Guildford, England, was a manufacturer of educational computer products.
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15 to 30 kHz variable sampling rates at a 12-bit resolution, (28.8 seconds and 14.4 seconds respectively) The samples can also be saved to disk (3.5-inch DSDD floppy disk drive).
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The SS10's enclosure can hold two 50-pin SCSI hard drives and a floppy disk drive. Other SCSI devices can be attached via the external SCSI port. There is no ATA disk support.
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The first product was a memory card for the S-100 bus. A full microcomputer using the Z80 microprocessor, the Vector 1, was introduced in 1977. There were several Vector Graphic models produced. The Vector 1+ had a floppy disk drive.
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The Korg X3 is a music workstation produced by Korg in 1993. The X3 features 200 programs, 200 combinations, 32-voice polyphony, a 32,000 note, 16-track sequencer with 100 patterns and 10 songs and a double-sided, double-density 3.5-inch floppy disk drive for song and other data storage types. Korg also released the X2 (76-key) with 8 Mbyte ROM (6Mbyte X3 + 2Mbyte new piano) in 1994 along with a rackmount version dubbed the X3R, which also had a floppy disk drive. Many of its samples come from the T3 Series and 01/W Series synthesizers.
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The Tandy 1000 TX was similar to the 1000 SX with its detached keyboard, unique parallel port edge connector and XT-style architecture in a slightly modified case. The major difference was the 80286 CPU clocked at 8 MHz. Similar to the IBM XT 286, it featured a 16-bit-wide memory bus, although the on-board peripherals and ISA slots were 8 bits wide.ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/tvdog/tandy1000/documents/txtech.zip The TX had a 3.5" internal floppy disk drive mounted in a 5.25" bay with room for an optional second internal 3.5" or 5.25" floppy disk drive.
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The motor from a 3.5 in floppy disk drive. The coils, arranged radially, are made from copper wire coated with blue insulation. The rotor (upper right) has been removed and turned upside-down. The grey ring inside its cup is a permanent magnet.
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It was also possible later to load the memory image and continue playing the game (or whatever was stored) from the respective state. 3.5-inch floppy disk drive called D80 was also introduced later in 1992 at the same time as Didaktik Kompakt was released.
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Byte Interview with Steve Wozniak Ultimately, the market for desktop computing would go to IBM PC compatible personal computers with a floppy disk drive based operating system, and an industry standard Intel 8088 processor (the IBM PC was announced shortly after the 80 series).
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The first floppy disk version of the machine included an 8-inch floppy disk drive, with two additional 8-inch drives available in a separate unit. Later, the A 5120 included up to three 5.25-inch drives in place of the 8-inch drive.
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The 21 MB Floptical -inch disk Floptical refers to a type of floppy disk drive that combines magnetic and optical technologies to store data on media similar to standard -inch floppy disks. The name is a portmanteau of the words "floppy" and "optical". It refers specifically to one brand of drive and disk system, but is also used more generically to refer to any system using similar techniques. The original Floptical technology was announced in 1988 and introduced late in 1991 by Insite Peripherals, a venture funded company set up by Jim Adkisson, one of the key engineers behind the original -inch floppy disk drive development at Shugart Associates in 1976.
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The original PERQ (also known as the PERQ 1), launched in 1980, was housed in a pedestal-type cabinet with a brown fascia and an 8-inch floppy disk drive mounted horizontally at the top. The PERQ 1 CPU had a WCS comprising 4k words of 48-bit microcode memory. The later PERQ 1A CPU extended the WCS to 16k words. The PERQ 1 could be configured with 256 kB, 1MB or 2 MB of 64-bit-wide RAM (accessed via a 16-bit bus), a 12 or 24 MB, 14-inch Shugart SA-4000-series hard disk, and an 8-inch floppy disk drive.
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They also created separate hands and a chest to film for close-up shots. Adam has a floppy disk drive mounted on his chest which, when used, had to be filmed without Hertzberg behind it. The entire construction of Adam's appearance took about two weeks.Holder, et al.
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Compare floppy disks in drive A: and drive B: diskcomp a: b: If the computer has only one floppy disk drive (in this case drive A:), it is still possible to compare two disks: diskcomp a: a: The `diskcomp` command will prompt to insert each disk, as needed.
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Commodore 8028 Daisy wheel printer :Commodore 2031 single disk drive ( single-sided 5.25-inch format) :Commodore 2040/3040 dual disk drives - The initial dual floppy disk drive units. 2040 (U.S.), 3040 (Europe). ( single-sided 5.25-inch format) :Commodore 4022 dot matrix printer, tractor feed, with Epson mechanicals.:File:Cbm4022p-2.
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The standard hard drive size in the series was 540 MB, with optional sizes of 340 and 810 MB up until the X and XD, where the hard drive sizes was changed to 1.08 GB and 1.35 GB with an additional 2.1 GB option in 1997. If the user wanted to upgrade their hard drive capacity past this, the BIOS had a hard drive capacity limitation of 8.9 GB because of BIOS INT 13H. The ThinkPad models ending with a D included a CD- ROM drive, the rest included a 1.44 MB floppy disk drive. Ones that had a CD- ROM drive had a proprietary external floppy disk drive port on the back.
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The Apricot Portable was designed to be transportable, but powered by mains electricity only. It consisted of a cased system unit with a motherboard, 640 × 256 pixel (80 × 25 character) monochrome display, a single floppy disk drive, and memory, and a separate wireless (infrared) keyboard. Software was bundled with it.
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CSG 5719 Gary, short for Gate Array, has been used in the Amiga 500, 2000(B) and CDTV. Gary provides glue logic for bus control and houses supporting functions for the floppy disk drive. It integrates many functions built discretely in the earlier Amiga 1000 in order to reduce costs.
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It came with 2 megabytes of installed RAM, and was expandable to 16 megabytes using SIMM memory cards. It had a 1.44 megabyte floppy disk drive, an internal 80 megabyte hard disk, and a CD-ROM drive. Five expansion slots were built-in. It came with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 operating systems.
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Another extension was the serially connected character video. It used a special protocol, EPSP, which was also used by the external floppy disk drive. The battery life of the HX-20 was approximately running BASIC and less using the microcassette, printer or RS-232. Data integrity could be preserved in the range.
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The LINK 480Z was packaged as an integrated keyboard and system unit. Early systems were supplied with a black sheet-metal case, however this was quickly replaced by a cream-coloured plastic housing. The optional 5¼-inch floppy disk drive unit was external. The only microprocessor offered was a 4 MHz Z80A.
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Also, standard-floppy disk drive emulation proved to be unsuitable for certain high-capacity floppy disk drives such as Iomega Zip drives. Later the ARMD-HDD, ARMD-"Hard disk device", variant was developed to address these issues. Under ARMD-HDD, an ARMD device appears to the BIOS and the operating system as a hard drive.
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A Commodore 64 system, showing the basic layout of a typical home computer system of the era. Pictured are the CPU/keyboard unit, floppy disk drive, and dedicated color monitor. Many systems also had a dot matrix printer for producing paper output. Eastern Bloc computers were often significantly different in appearance from western computers.
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The Roland S-50 is a 61-key 12-bit sampler keyboard produced by the Roland Corporation in 1986. It featured a 3.5-inch DSDD floppy disk drive and had external CRT monitor support to facilitate editing of samples. It could hold up to 32 samples. A rack-mounted version was also available, which featured expanded memory.
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The standard hard drive size was 170 or 340 MB, later adding the option to 540 MB. All models in the series had a 1.44 MB floppy disk drive in an ultrabay. Two notable models in the series, the 360P & 360PE, featured a pen touch display, which could also fold back and down to close like a tablet.
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The Olivetti P6040 was a microprocessor-based personal computer (8080) with a floppy disk drive that used proprietary 2.5 inch sleeveless disks. The P6040 was programmable in Mini BASIC. Designed by Pier Giorgio Perotto, it was presented at Hannover Messe in April 1975 together with the P6060, its hardware used TTL technology. Both had a brown-colored case.
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The C65 includes the same ports of the C64. In addition, there is a DMA port for memory expansion. The latter is attached just like on the Amiga 500 via a flap in the bottom of the board. The built-in floppy disk drive is connected in parallel, serial Commodore drives can be connected via the usual IEC port.
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The PowerBook 180 came with a (diagonal) active matrix LCD screen capable of displaying 4-bit grayscale at a resolution of 640x400, and a trackball was mounted beneath the keyboard. A 1.44 MB floppy disk drive and 80 MB 2.5-inch hard drive were also standard. The Apple Powerbook also gave an option of possible expansion to a 120 MB hard drive.
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Commodore Datasette 1530 In the United States, the 1541 floppy disk drive was widespread. By contrast, in Europe, the C64 was often used with cassette tape drives (Datasette), which were much cheaper, but also much slower than floppy drives. The Datasette plugged into a proprietary edge connector on the Commodore 64's motherboard. Standard blank audio cassettes could be used in this drive.
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The SPARCstation 1 takes 30 pin SIMMs in groups of four. It can take either 1 MB or 4 MB SIMMs as long as the size is consistent within a bank. There are a total of four memory banks, which can give a total of 64 MB of memory. The memory bank nearest the floppy disk drive should be filled first.
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It was during this time in late July that Tramiel's representatives discovered the original Atari Inc./Amiga contract. BYTE had reported in April 1984 that Amiga "is developing a 68000-based home computer with a custom graphics processor. With 128K bytes of RAM and a floppy-disk drive, the computer will reportedly sell for less than $1000 late this year".
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Paula chip (MOS Technology 8364 R4) used in Amiga 1000 Paula chip (MOS Technology 8364 R4) die The Paula chip, from MOS Technology, is the interrupt controller, but also includes logic for audio playback, floppy disk drive control, serial port input/output and mouse/joystick buttons two and three signals. The logic remained functionally identical across all Amiga models from Commodore.
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A floppy disk hardware emulator for a 3½ drive. The front of an emulator, showing the USB data exchange port. A floppy disk hardware emulator is a device that emulates a mechanical floppy disk drive with a solid state or network storage device that is plug compatible with the drive it replaces, similar to how solid-state drives replace mechanical hard disk drives.
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The Kawai Q-80 by Kawai Musical Instruments in 1989, is a music sequencer that has a built in 2DD floppy disk drive for storage. It allows playback, editing, and recording via its MIDI connections. There is a battery backup to hold the configuration when the unit is powered down. The tempo can be set from 40-250 beats per minute.
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Third-party displays quickly became available. The Los Angeles Times reviewer called the color "spectacular." The operating system user interface remained black and white even on color monitors with the exception of the Apple logo, which appeared in rainbow color. Storage: A 5.25-inch 40 MB internal SCSI hard disk was optional, as was a second internal 800 kilobyte 3.5-inch floppy disk drive.
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The Shugart bus is the de facto standard for floppy disk drive interfaces created by Shugart Associates. It encompasses a 50-pin interface for 8-inch disk drives, and a 34-pin for -, - and 3-inch disk drives. Shugart 50-pin and 34-pin are similar in pinout. However the 34-pin used in -inch drives is not similar to the IBM PC type -inch format.
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One example, version 1.5 of the software, was shipped on three 5.25-inch, 360K floppy disks. It ran on an 8088-based PC with a single 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, DOS 2, 256KB RAM, and an EGA or 640x480 VGA display. This version would also run on a Hercules-type monochrome 720x348 graphics card. A series of submenus allowed configuration changes to the game.
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Zenith purchased Heath for the flexible assembly line infrastructure at the nearby St. Joseph facility as well as the R&D; assets. Heath/Zenith was in the vanguard of companies to start selling personal computers to small business. The H89 kit was re-branded as the Zenith Z-89/Z-90, an assembled all in one system with a monitor and a floppy disk drive.
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The SPARCstation IPC can hold one internal 3.5", 50-pin, single ended, fast-narrow SE SCSI disk drive and a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy disk drive. It also supports external SCSI devices. There is no IDE/ATAPI support. Modern 80 pin Single Connector Attachment (SCA) drives can work with an adapter, but do not fit inside the case due to the size of the adapter.
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It had an 80-column graphical thermal printer, 48 Kbytes of RAM, and BASIC language. It was in competition with a similar product by IBM that had an external floppy disk drive. The assembly line was located in the Olivetti factories of Scarmagno, some modules forming subsets of the machine as a printer or floppy disks were manufactured at plants in San Bernardo d'Ivrea.
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Wireless keyboard is able to operate up to 12–15 meters from the machine for about three hours (recharging takes 16 hours). West PC-800 can take several CPU cards including MS-DOS package (NOK3,000) and Motorola 68000 (NOK7-12,000) expansion cards. There was even a Motorola 6809 CPU card for OS-9 compatibility. The computer allows cassette and floppy disk drive data storage.
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West PC-800 was well received by the press. Especially lauded were alarm features and high flexibility of the machine design. On the other hand, graphics capabilities were found dated by 1985 standards and support for some of the platforms rather rudimentary (e.g. supplied only an old MSDOS version, issue with Z80 speed without another CPU card, limited data transfer on available floppy disk drive).
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Also, because there could be more than one floppy disk controller in two or more cartridge slots, MSX-DOS could boot from several different floppy disk drives. This meant that it was possible to have both, a 5¼" floppy disk drive and a 3½" disk drive, and the user could boot from either one of them depending on which drive had a bootable floppy in it.
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CPC6128 motherboard. The CPC6128 features 128 KB RAM and an internal 3-inch floppy disk drive. Aside from various hardware and firmware improvements, one of the CPC6128's most prominent features is the compatibility with the CP/M+ operating system that rendered it attractive for business uses. The CPC6128 was released in August 1985 and initially only sold in the US. Imported and distributed by Indescomp, Inc.
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Several connector types have become established for connecting power in desktop PCs because of the simplicity, reliability, flexibility, and low cost of the Molex design. Certain Molex connectors are used for providing power to the motherboard, fans, floppy disk drive, CD/DVD drive, video card, some older hard drive models, and more. Compatible connectors are available from many manufacturers, not just Molex and AMP.
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The Commodore 8280 is a dual 8" floppy disk drive for Commodore International computers. It uses a wide rectangular steel case form similar to that of the Commodore 4040, and uses the parallel IEEE-488 interface common to Commodore PET/CBM computers. The 8280 replaced the earlier 806x series 8" drives and switched to half-height drives. Like the 8061/62 units, the 8280 supports IBM 3740 disks.
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BEWARE OF THE er..VIRUS : this program is catching program follows after these messages....$#@%$@!!` There are many minor and major variations to that version of the text. The virus slows down the floppy disk drive and makes seven kilobytes of memory unavailable to DOS. Brain was written by Amjad Farooq Alvi and Basit Farooq Alvi, who at the time lived in Chah Miran, near Lahore Railway Station, in Lahore, Pakistan.
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The device's most prominent use was in the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128(D), each of which included two CIA chips. The Commodore 1570 and Commodore 1571 floppy disk drives contained one CIA each. Furthermore, the Amiga home computers and the Commodore 1581 floppy disk drive employed a modified variant of the CIA circuit called 8520. 8520 is functionally equivalent to the 6526 except for the simplified TOD circuitry.
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Standard floppy disk drive (FDD) had 142 KB formatted capacity (Apple II compatible) and there were several other storage options e.g. additional FDD 655 KB, 128 KB RAM disk or hard disk drives up to 20 MB. West PC-800 offers rich expansion capabilities thanks to the Apple II compatible expansion bus with 7 expansion slots (some are occupied in the standard configuration e.g. by an alarm card or RF modulator).
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Mac 512K with accessories An updated version replaced the Macintosh 512K and debuted as the Macintosh 512K enhanced in April 1986. It differed from the original 512K in that it had an 800 kB floppy disk drive "This article gives the specifications for the 800K floppy disks and the 1.44 MB floppy disks." 800K Disk has 1600 sectors and 1.44 MB Disk has 2880 sectors. A sector is 512 bytes.
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The CPC models' hardware is based on the Zilog Z80A CPU, complemented with either 64 or 128 KB of RAM. Their computer-in-a-keyboard design prominently features an integrated storage device, either a compact cassette deck or 3 inch floppy disk drive. The main units were only sold bundled with either a colour, green-screen or monochrome monitor that doubles as the main unit's power supply.CPC464 User Manual, p.
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The Yamaha Disklavier player piano. The unit mounted under the keyboard of the piano can play MIDI or audio software on its CD or floppy disk drive. In the 2000s, some pianos include an acoustic grand piano or upright piano combined with MIDI electronic features. Such a piano can be played acoustically, or the keyboard can be used as a MIDI controller, which can trigger a synthesizer module or music sampler.
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Disklaviers have been manufactured in the form of upright, baby grand, and grand piano styles (including a nine-foot concert grand). Reproducing systems have ranged from relatively simple, playback-only models to professional models that can record performance data at resolutions that exceed the limits of normal MIDI data. The unit mounted under the keyboard of the piano can play MIDI or audio software on its CD or floppy disk drive.
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Unlike the GRiD, it was equipped with a floppy disk drive and used the MS-DOS operating system, although it was only partially IBM PC- compatible. Powered by a 5 MHz Intel 8088 processor, it was equipped with a basic graphical user interface, stored in its 48 kb of ROM. An internal 300-baud modem was standard. A compact printer that attached to the rear of the machine was an option.
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SIO required logic in the peripherals to support the protocols, and in some cases a significant amount of processing power was required - the Atari 810 floppy disk drive included a MOS Technology 6507 for instance. Additionally, the large custom connector was expensive. These drove up costs of the SIO system, and Decuir blames this for "sinking the system". There were unsuccessful efforts to lower the cost of the system during the 8-bits history.
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Others needed hardware modifications such as a memory expansion or modification, new boot ROMs, or the addition of a floppy disk drive. A few very popular home computers using processors not supported by CP/M had plug-in Z80 or compatible processors, allowing them to use CP/M and retaining the base machine's keyboard, peripherals, and sometimes video display and memory. The following is an alphabetical list of some computers running CP/M.
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This latter feature made the Triple X attractive to the UK academic community, where X.25 networks were prevalent at the time. Standard RAM capacity was 1 MB, expandable to 7 MB via VME cards. A 720 kB, 5.25 in floppy disk drive and ST-506-compatible 20 MB hard disk were fitted as standard, interfaced to the SCSI bus via an OMTI adapter. Either a 10 or 13 inch colour monitor was supplied.
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All models came equipped with a Floppy Disk Drive, VGA output and PC Card slot as standard. They also came with on-board JBL stereo speakers and Synaptics touchpads. These systems were preinstalled with Windows 98, Windows Me or Windows 2000 Professional. They were supplied with a Quick Restore disc which returned the system to its factory condition in the event of change of ownership, wish to reinstall the OS or system failure.
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Early editions of the Agat came with a cassette tape reader and a keyboard, although later editions replaced the tape reader with a 5¼ inch floppy disk drive. The keyboard utilised the standard Russian keyboard layout, and offered a choice between either Cyrillic or Latin symbols. Earlier models had very limited upgradeability, but later models incorporated additional upgrade and peripheral slots to allow expansion. Other available peripherals included a printer, mouse, and memory upgrades.
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The original Apple II provided an operating system in ROM along with a BASIC variant called Integer BASIC. The only form of storage available was cassette tape. When the Disk II floppy disk drive was released in 1978, a new operating system, Apple DOS, was commissioned from Shepardson Microsystems and developed by Paul Laughton, adding support for the disk drive. The final and most popular version of this software was Apple DOS 3.3.
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The H8 required a separate terminal to be truly useful; Heathkit introduced several terminals as well. A successor model, the "All-in-One" Heathkit H89, combined a Z-80 processor board and a floppy disk drive into the cabinet of an Heathkit H19 terminal. This model also was sold in fully assembled form as the WH89. These were later sold by Zenith Electronics with their name on the front as the Zenith Z-89.
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The built-in 16-track sequencer is derived from the Roland MC-series hardware sequencers, and can import sequences saved on those machines. The XP-50 sequencer also accepts standard MIDI files. The sequencer can store up to 60,000 notes and 100 patterns. Eschewing the PCM & Data Card slots that Roland had been using since the JD-800 in 1991, the XP-50 includes a 3.5 inch floppy disk drive for data import or export.
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The Triton Le, released in 2002, was a stripped-down, streamlined version of the original Triton. It uses a smaller non-touch screen similar to the TRITON-RACK. Rack The ribbon controller and floppy disk drive were omitted but a Smartmedia slot was instead included. A lighter and cheaper key bed than those used on the Trinity/original Triton range was installed, and the effects bus was downscaled from five insert effects to one.
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Processor Technology invited all of their dealers to a meeting in Emeryville, California, outside Berkeley, to introduce their Helios floppy disk drive for $1,199, along with their PTDOS system to work with it. They also promised larger memory cards and a color video card. Additionally, dealers could now order 30 days net, as opposed to cash-on-delivery, although to do so they had to put in orders at least once a quarter.
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The Ensoniq SQ-80 is a synthesizer released in 1987-1989 and from Ensoniq. It was basically an update to their first product, the Ensoniq ESQ-1. Compared to the ESQ-1, the SQ-80 includes 43 additional waveforms (including five drumkits), an enhanced sequencer, and a floppy disk drive for storing patches and sequences. Synthesis-wise, the SQ-80 introduced the so-called 2nd Release, a low-cost solution to simulate reverb-like effects.
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Gary Kildall originally developed CP/M during 1974, as an operating system to run on an Intel Intellec-8 development system, equipped with a Shugart Associates 8-inch floppy disk drive interfaced via a custom floppy disk controller. It was written in Kildall's own PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers). Various aspects of CP/M were influenced by the TOPS-10 operating system of the DECsystem-10 mainframe computer, which Kildall had used as a development environment.
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Compatible only with the PowerBook 2400c, the Macintosh PowerBook 2400c Floppy Disk Drive (M4327) used a unique Molex connector rather than the previous HDI-20 connector. Possibly because of the 2400c's IBM design heritage, both the drive and computer use the same connectors as IBM ThinkPad external floppy drives from the same period; however, IBM drives are not electrically compatible. The drive was discontinued in 1998, and would be the last external floppy drive manufactured by Apple.
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Commodore also produced the DPS-1101 daisy wheel printer, which produced letter quality print similar to a typewriter based on a Juki mechanism, and which typically cost more than the computer and floppy disk drive together. The DPS-1101 was large enough to accept A4 size paper in landscape orientation as well as A3 size paper in portrait orientation. The MPS-1000 dot matrix printer was introduced along with the C-128. Commodore 1526 is a rebranded MPS 802.
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Uses a proprietary operating system, which consists of the EPSON BASIC interpreter and a monitor program, and weighs approximately . Known colours of the machine are silver and cream, while some prototypes were dark grey. The HX-20 was supplied with a grey or brown carry case. An external acoustic coupler, the CX-20, was available for the HX-20, as was an external floppy disk drive, the TF-20, and an external speech synthesis Augmentative Communication Device (ACD), 'RealVoice'.
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One modification to the typeface was the removal of the dot over the i. The s was also modified for the label on the Disk II 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. According to the logo designer, Rob Janoff, the typeface was selected for its playful qualities and techno look, which were in line with Apple's mission statement of making high technology accessible to anyone. Janoff designed the logo in 1977 while working with Palo Alto marketer Regis McKenna.
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A number of changes to the packaged software were included, such as the At Ease desktop alternative which aimed to provide a simpler user interface than the standard Macintosh Finder. The exact software included tended to vary from one retailer to the next. It was initially offered at a retail price of about $1,250 USD. The Classic II is the last black-and-white compact Macintosh, and the last desktop Macintosh to include an external floppy disk drive port.
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1 operating system. It did not have a built-in floppy disk drive and was noted for its unique compact design that placed a trackball pointing device in front of the keyboard for ease of use. Apple's then-chief executive officer (CEO) John Sculley started the PowerBook project in 1990, allocating $1 million for marketing. Despite the small marketing budget, the new PowerBook line was a success, generating over $1 billion in revenue for Apple in its first year.
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An Amiga 500, with 1084S RGB monitor and A1010 floppy disk drive. (1987) In 1990, Commodore released a significant update of the Amiga platform, in the shape of the Amiga 3000 featuring an enhanced chipset (ECS) and the second release of its operating system, commonly referred to as Workbench 2.0. Commodore had a poor reputation among consumers and developers. Computer Gaming World wrote in 1990 of its "abysmal record of customer and technical support in the past".
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The PCW 8256's RAM could be expanded to 512 KB for a hardware cost of about £50. An additional internal floppy disk drive for the 8256 would cost about £100, and installation was fairly easy. Alternatively one could add external drives, for example if a 3½-inch drive was needed. Graphical user interface devices such as light pens, mice and graphic tablets could be attached to the expansion socket at the back of the monitor.
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Computers with 32K or 48K RAM can be upgraded with floppy disk drive storage. There is space inside the computer cabinet for two full-height drives. Those offered by Tandy/RadioShack are single-sided, 40 track, double-density (MFM encoding) for 180K of storage. Third-party suppliers offered double-sided and 80-track drives, though to control them they had to modify the TRSDOS driver code or else furnish an alternative third-party DOS which could (see below).
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The standard floppy drive was upgraded to a 1.2 MB 5¼ inch floppy disk drive (15 sectors of 512 bytes, 80 tracks, two sides,) which stored over three times as much data as the 360 KB PC floppy disk, but had compatibility problems with 360k disks. 3½ inch) floppy drives became available in later ATs. A 20 MB hard disk drive was included as standard. Early drives were manufactured by Computer Memories and were found to be very unreliable.
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For example, a docking station for a floppy disk drive would need to be removed in order to attach a docking station for the magneto-optical drive. Katz Media produced a generic docking station, containing a PCI slot, allowing a user to install PCI cards. No PCI-based peripherals were ever developed specifically for the Pippin. As Bandai specifically marketed its Pippin models as game consoles, many of the titles produced are games and entertainment software or edutainment software.
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David Alan Smith completed the first scenes of The Colony with a C compiler ported to the Macintosh by Softworks. Those first scenes were developed on a Macintosh with only 128KB of RAM and a single floppy disk drive. Eventually, development tools were made available on the Macintosh, allowing Mr. Smith to complete his work using the Megamax C and Lightspeed C compilers—on a Macintosh upgraded to 512KB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive.
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An upgrade kit was offered for the earlier Macintosh 128K and Macintosh 512K/enhanced, which includes a new motherboard, floppy disk drive and rear case. The owner retained the front case, monitor and analog board. Because of this, there is no "Macintosh Plus" on the front of upgraded units, and the Apple logo is recessed and in the bottom left hand corner of the front case. However, the label on the back of the case reads "Macintosh Plus 1MB".
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A CPC664 main unit (German Schneider-brand variant) The CPC664 features 64 KB RAM and an internal 3-inch floppy disk drive. It was introduced in May 1985 in the UK. Initial suggested retail prices for the CPC664 were GBP£339.00/DM1198.00 with a green screen and GBP£449.00/DM1998.00 with a colour monitor. After the successful release of the CPC464, consumers were constantly asking for two improvements: more memory and an internal disk drive. For Amstrad, the latter was easier to realise. At the deliberately low- key introduction of the CPC664 in May 1985, the machine was positioned not only as the lowest-cost disk system but even the lowest-cost CP/M 2.2 machine. In the Amstrad CPC product range the CPC664 complemented the CPC464 which was neither discontinued nor reduced in price.The CPC664, Amstrad Computer User May 1985, P. 42-46. Compared to the CPC464, the CPC664's main unit has been significantly redesigned, not only to accommodate the floppy disk drive but also with a redesigned keyboard area.
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In 1989 Tandy updated the 3000 HL with several improvements: clock speed of 10 MHz and a 3.5 inch high density (1.44 MB) floppy disk drive. The all-new cabinet has two 3.5 inch and two 5.25 inch drive bays. It has the same expansion slots as the 3000 HL (three AT and four XT slots) plus one high- speed 10 MHz slot dedicated to memory expansion. Maximum RAM that can be installed in the slots is now sixteen megabytes.
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Because it had two processors, it could load and play up to eight instruments simultaneously (with another eight on reserve). The display was a 22 character single line vacuum fluorescent display. It booted from an integrated floppy disk drive (sourced from Sony or Matsushita), or from a SCSI drive connected to the expansion bay. The EPS came with 256 Kwords of RAM on board. Ensoniq offered both a 2x (512Kword) Memory Expander and a 4x (1Mword) Memory Expander with SCSI interface.
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The original iMac was the first legacy-free PC. It was the first Macintosh computer to have a USB port but no floppy disk drive. Subsequently, all Macs have included USB. Via the USB port, hardware makers could make products compatible with both x86 PCs and Macs. Previously, Macintosh users had to seek out certain hardware, such as keyboards and mice specifically tailored for the "old world" Mac's unique ADB interface and printers and modems with MiniDIN-8 serial ports.
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Both the NC100 and NC200 were licensed to a company called NTS Computer Systems in British Columbia and marketed as the Dreamwriter 100 and Dreamwriter 200, respectively. These were the same computers apart from having only Protext and Personal information manager apps installed (no BBC Basic, no games, and no spreadsheet). The Dreamwriter 200 had a 1.44 MB floppy disk drive, an upgrade from the NC200's 720 KB drive. Its user guide cautions against using the low-density floppy disks.
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In 1999, Apple introduced the Graphite gray Apple iMac and since has varied the shape, color and size considerably while maintaining the all-in-one design. Design ideas were intended to create a connection with the user such as the handle and a breathing light effect when the computer went to sleep. The Apple iMac sold for $1,299 at that time. The iMac also featured forward-thinking changes, such as eschewing the floppy disk drive and moving exclusively to USB for connecting peripherals.
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1541-II floppy disk drive and 1084S monitor displaying television-compatible S-Video The C64's designers intended the computer to have a new, wedge-shaped case within a year of release, but the change did not occur. In 1986, Commodore released the 64C computer, which is functionally identical to the original. The exterior design was remodeled in the sleeker style of the Commodore 128. The 64C uses new versions of the SID, VIC-II, and I/O chips being deployed.
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The built-in display was a one-bit black-and-white, CRT with a fixed resolution of 512 × 342 pixels, establishing the desktop publishing standard of 72 PPI. Expansion and networking were achieved using two non-standard RS-422 DE-9 serial ports named "printer" and "modem"; they did not support hardware handshaking. An external floppy disk drive could be added using a proprietary connector (19-pin D-sub). The keyboard and mouse used simple proprietary protocols, allowing some third-party upgrades.
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The earliest Apple IIs were assembled in Silicon Valley, and later in Texas; printed circuit boards were manufactured in Ireland and Singapore. An external 5-inch floppy disk drive, the Disk II, attached via a controller card that plugged into one of the computer's expansion slots (usually slot 6), was used for data storage and retrieval to replace cassettes. The Disk II interface, created by Steve Wozniak, was regarded as an engineering masterpiece for its economy of electronic components.Freiberger, Paul, and Michael Swaine.
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Two other noteworthy early laptops were the Sharp PC-5000 (similar in many respects to the Dulmont Magnum) and the Gavilan SC, announced in 1983 but first sold in 1984, Gavilan filing bankruptcy the same year. Both ran the 8/16-bit Intel 8088 CPU. The Gavilan was notably the first computer to be marketed as a "laptop". It was equipped with an internal floppy disk drive and a pioneering touchpad-like pointing device, installed on a panel above the keyboard.
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It had a modem which allowed remote analysis by the manufacturer. The software run by the administrative processor was initially called the Totally Unrealistic Remote Diagnostic. This name was changed some years later. A minimal system was delivered in a single 19″ rack about 60″ high with the card cage in the bottom, the disk drive in the middle, the tape drive above it, then the 2 inch high control panel with a floppy disk drive and ignition key on the top.
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Because Amiga was one of the first game-oriented computers to feature a built- in floppy disk drive, it simplified software piracy. Many of the arguments pertaining to software copying, intellectual property rights in software, the open-source movement by the early 1990s. It was not unusual for demo groups to be openly involved in software piracy. Anti-piracy measures included the practice of distributing software on disks that contained secret "keys" on high-numbered tracks that were officially unused.
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Since the invention of the floppy disk drive, various standardized form factors have been used in computing systems. Standardized form factors and interface allow a variety of peripherals and upgrades thereto with no impact to the physical size of a computer system. Drives may slot into a drive bay of the corresponding size. Compared to flash drives in same form factor, maximum rotating disk drive capacity is much smaller, with 100 TB available in 2018, and 32 TB for 2.5-inch.
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The Macintosh LC 575 was available from 1994 to 1996. It retains the "all-in-one" case of the LC 520/550, but uses the LC 475's motherboard with a Motorola 68LC040 CPU (at a speed of 33 MHz instead of 25 MHz) and a tray-loading optical drive. It also included a high density floppy disk drive. The CPU clock is sometimes given as 66 MHz, since the clock signal is of that frequency - however, the processor itself only runs at 33 MHz.
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Additional options included several PCMCIA cards, a color LCD screen, and a color LCD touch-screen with a special version of OS/2. The PC borrowed some components from IBM's ThinkPad laptops: including the 1.44MB floppy disk drive and the hard disk drive. Its enclosure was composed of recycled plastics, and was designed to be easily recycled at the end of its service life. The power supply unit maximum power consumption was 24watts, and was completely passively cooled, and lacked a fan for that reason.
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Thus, users were forced to develop and produce various and sometimes funny home-made interfaces to satisfy their needs. Data storing and monitor type was the same as in the case of the Gama. Two floppy disk drives were developed and released later to offer the possibility of fast saving/loading of various programs. 5.25-inch floppy disk drive called D40 was introduced in 1992 and featured a "Snapshot" (see also Hibernation (computing)) button that allowed to store current content of the memory (memory image) on diskette.
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After the disk controller card and the video card are installed six slots are available for expansion, which is one more than the PC-AT offers. On the other hand, the Tandy computer lacks the AT's locking keyswitch for operational security. There are three drive bays available; two are accessible through the front panel, so two may be floppy drives or other replaceable media like a PCMCIA card reader. A single 1.2 MB 5.25 inch floppy disk drive was included in the base configuration.
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An example here would be WordStar, a word processor popular in the 1980s which used a closed data format. WordStar is no longer readily available and modern machines are not configured to read data in this format. #Hardware: the hardware needed to access the digital file becomes obsolete and thus no longer available. One example is the floppy disk and floppy disk drive; the disks are no longer commercially available and modern computers no longer have the drives to read them built in as standard.
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Those consoles have a floppy disk drive unit attached, with a clock unit, for saving students' progress and sharing them with teachers. Data was stored in a central database and the system offered an advanced multimedia environment with statistics. It was replaced with PC systems after some years of intensive use and a very strong stock of spare consoles and pieces. In 1995, Taurus Ventures Inc in Burnaby, BC developed the VanCity Direct TV system based on the CD32 for the VanCity Credit Union.
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The Mindset was released on 2 May 1984. The base model with 64K RAM and no floppy disk drive sold for US$1,099, a 128K model with single disk was available for $1,798, and a 256K dual-disk version cost $2,398. The disk-less version of the machine was still usable, as the system also included two ROM cartridge ports on the front of the machine that could be used for the operating system and another program. The canonical cartridge was an extended version of GW-BASIC.
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The Indus GT is a floppy disk drive that was made by Indus Systems of California, USA during the early 1980s for Apple II and Atari 8-bit family and later for the Commodore platforms of the day. It came in a black casing with a smoke plexiglas cover over the drive mechanism. Behind the cover is an 8-segment LED track and sector display. It was considered as a high-quality unit, regarded by many as the best floppy drive available for 8-bit Ataris.
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The console had two integrated joystick/membrane keypad controllers (much like the ColecoVision and Atari 5200) which, when set in a special compartment on top of the console, could be used as a computer keyboard. The CreatiVision had interfaces for a cassette player, an extra rubber keyboard, parallel I/O interface, floppy disk drive and modem (likely unreleased) and one memory expansion module for use with the Basic language cartridge. Any Centronics-compatible printer could be connected to the I/O module if present.
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The 380Z used a Z80 microprocessor (hence the name) with up to 56 KB of user RAM. When fitted with an optional floppy disk drive the system ran the CP/M operating system. The basic system came with a text-only monochrome video card, which could be enhanced with a 320×192 high- resolution graphics board. Aided by a British government subsidy to schools for half of the price the 380Z was sold mainly to educational institutions in the United Kingdom, with some also sold to industry.
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Sample playback. In addition to the machine's internal 6 MB ROM sampled waveforms, the user could install up to 8 MB (divided into two banks of 4 MB) sample RAM (volatile), via 30-pin SIMMs. The samples could be loaded from the floppy disk drive, or via a SCSI hard drive or CD-ROM attached to the machine, containing an ASR-format disk. The synth even remembered the mapping of samples and sounds used, and requested the appropriate disks for loading in power-up.
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An operating system may define volumes or logical disks and assign each to one physical disk, more than one physical disk or part of the storage area of a physical disk. For example, Windows NT can create several partitions on a hard disk drive, each of which a separate volume with its own file system. Each floppy disk drive, optical disc drive or USB flash drive in Windows NT becomes one volume. Windows NT can also create partitions that span multiple hard disks drives.
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The PowerBook 100 was the first PowerBook to incorporate SCSI Disk Mode, which allowed it to be used as an external hard disk on a desktop Macintosh. This provided a convenient method for software to be installed onto the PowerBook or transferred to the desktop, without the need for the 100's optional floppy disk drive. A specialized SCSI cable with a unique connector was required, however, to use any SCSI device on the PowerBook series. A second dedicated cable was required for SCSI Disk Mode.
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This is selected as one of the milestones of IEEE. Toshiba Rupo JW-P22(K)（March 1986） and an optional micro floppy disk drive unit JW-F201 Sharp Shoin WD-J150 The Japanese word processing was made possible with the development of the Japanese input method, which is now widely used in personal computers. Japanese language uses vast numbers of Kanji (Chinese characters) besides Hiragana and Katakana which are 2-byte letters. Oki launched OKI WORD EDITOR-200 in March 1979 with this kana keyboard input system.
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Denise also supports eight sprites, single pixel scrolling, and a "dual-playfield" mode. Denise also handles mouse and digital joystick input. Paula is primarily the audio chip, with four independent hardware-mixed 8-bit PCM sound channels, each of which supports 65 volume levels (no sound to maximum volume) and waveform output rates from roughly 20 samples per second to almost 29,000 samples per second. Paula also handles interrupts and various I/O functions including the floppy disk drive, the serial port, and analog joysticks.
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The Sage acted as the CPU, and BYTE described "big steel boxes" substituting for the chipset that did not yet exist. The magazine reported in April 1984 that Amiga Corporation "is developing a 68000-based home computer with a custom graphics processor. With 128K bytes of RAM and a floppy-disk drive, the computer will reportedly sell for less than $1000 late this year." Further presentations were made at the following CES in June 1984, to Sony, HP, Philips, Apple, Silicon Graphics, and others.
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The CDTV was launched by Commodore in 1991. In common with the Philips CD-i and the 3DO, the CDTV was intended as an all-in-one home multimedia appliance that would play games, music, movies, and other interactive content. The name was short for "Commodore Dynamic Total Vision". The hardware was based on the Amiga computer with a single-speed CD-ROM drive rather than a floppy disk drive, in a case that was designed to integrate unobtrusively with a home entertainment center.
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The 3Station was a diskless workstation, developed by Bob Metcalfe at 3Com and first available in 1986. The 3Station/2E had a 10 MHz 80286 processor, 1 megabyte of RAM (expandable to ), VGA-compatible graphics with of video RAM, and integrated AUI/10BASE2 (BNC) network transceivers for LAN access. The product used a single printed-circuit board with four custom ASICs. It had neither a floppy disk drive nor a hard disk; it was booted from a server and stored all end-user files there.
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IBM manufactured magnetic disk storage devices from 1956 to 2003, when it sold its hard disk drive business to Hitachi. Both the hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD) were invented by IBM and as such IBM's employees were responsible for many of the innovations in these products and their technologies. The basic mechanical arrangement of hard disk drives has not changed since the IBM 1301. Disk drive performance and characteristics are measured by the same standards now as they were in the 1950s.
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By 2006, computers were rarely manufactured with installed floppy disk drives; -inch floppy disks can still be used with an external USB floppy disk drive. USB drives for -inch, 8-inch, and non-standard floppy disks are rare to non-existent. Some individuals and organizations continue to use older equipment to read or transfer data from floppy disks. Floppy disks were so common in late 20th-century culture that many electronic and software programs continue to use save icons that look like floppy disks well into the 21st century.
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IBM DemiDiskette media and Model 341 FDD In the early 1980s, IBM Rochester developed a 4-inch floppy disk drive, the Model 341 and an associated diskette, the DemiDiskette. This program was driven by aggressive cost goals, but missed the pulse of the industry. The prospective users, both inside and outside IBM, preferred standardization to what by release time were small cost reductions, and were unwilling to retool packaging, interface chips and applications for a proprietary design. The product was announced and withdrawn in 19831983 Disk/Trend Report - Flexible Disk Drives, December 1983 p.
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The ABC 1600 was a personal computer from Luxor that was introduced in 1985. It was built around the Motorola 68008 processor, had of memory and used the operating system ABCenix, a Unix-like system developed from DNIX. The ABC 1600 used monochrome graphics with a display resolution of and the screen could be turned 90° while in use depending on whether the user desired to work in standing (portrait) or horizontal (landscape) format. The hard disk had a capacity of 13 MB and the 5.25-inch floppy disk drive stored .pc-museum.
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Brinch Hansen also worked with Charles Simonyi and Peter Kraft on the RC 4000's Real-time Control System. A Regnecentralen RC-759 Piccoline, with floppy disk drive, photographed by Thomas Hillebrandt RC also began selling the Data General Nova under license in 1970 as the RC 7000, later introducing their own updated version as the RC 3600 the next year. This series filled a niche similar to the RC 4000, but for much smaller installations. The RC 3600 became a fixture of many Danish schools and universities.
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Official company documents state that Shugart quit, but he himself claims that he was fired by the venture capitalists. Shugart went on with Finis Conner to found Shugart Technology in 1979, which was later renamed to Seagate Technology in response to a legal challenge by Xerox. Shugart SA400 minifloppy -inch disk drive. The -inch floppy disk drive was introduced by Shugart in September 1976 as the Shugart SA-400 Minifloppy (Shugart's trademarked brand name)Sollman, G. Evolution of the minifloppy (TM) product family IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Jul 1978.
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The expansion port connector also had signal lines for an RS232 serial connection which Basic supported with several commands, but its main use was to connect a 5¼-inch floppy disk drive. On its left side the JR-200 had two DB-9 joystick connectors which could be connected to standard (Atari style) joysticks, which could be read by the Basic STICK command. In contrast to most other home computers of the time the JR-200 did not use an external transformer unit but had a built-in, completely contained, power supply.
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The iMac did away with most of Apple's standard (and usually proprietary) connections, such as SCSI and ADB, in favor of two USB ports. It replaced a floppy disk drive with a CD-ROM drive for installing software, but was incapable of writing to CDs or other media without external third-party hardware. The iMac proved to be phenomenally successful, with 800,000 units sold in 139 days. It made the company an annual profit of US$309 million, Apple's first profitable year since Michael Spindler took over as CEO in 1995.
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MONECS systems were based on the PDP-11/05 or PDP-11/10 processors with core memory. This was identical hardware rebadged by the manufacturer DEC just to indicate an OEM version. Student systems were fitted with a custom UNIBUS interface to support the Memorex 651 flexible drive which was an early version of an 8-inch floppy disk. Next major releases were the DEAMON systems based on PDP-11/04 or PDP/11/34 processors with semiconductor memory and DEC RX01 8-inch floppy disk drive(s).
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The Model 100 firmware was the last Microsoft product that Bill Gates developed personally, along with Suzuki. According to Gates, "part of my nostalgia about this machine is this was the last machine where I wrote a very high percentage of the code in the product". Added applications and data files are stored in the internal battery-backed RAM; these can be loaded from and stored to an audio cassette tape recorder or external floppy disk drive. Optional ROMs can be installed in the Model 100, providing a range of customized application software.
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The Macintosh II was introduced at the AppleWorld 1987 conference in Los Angeles, with low- volume initial shipments starting two months later. Retailing for US $5,498, the Macintosh II was the first "modular" Macintosh model, so called because it came in a horizontal desktop case like many IBM PC compatibles of the time. All previous Macintosh computers used an all-in-one design with a built-in black-and-white CRT. The Macintosh II had drive bays for an internal hard disk (originally 40 MB or 80 MB) and an optional second floppy disk drive.
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The Bondwell-2 was an early laptop personal computer running the CP/M operating system. Introduced by Bondwell in 1985, it came with a Zilog Z80 CPU clocked at 4 MHz, 64 kB RAM and 4 kB ROM. It had a 3.5" floppy disk drive, highly unusual for a CP/M system, as this OS was largely outmoded by the time 3.5" drives were introduced. The Model 2's main attraction was its price, at 995 USD it also included MicroPro's complete line of CP/M software, including WordStar.
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It featured a 640×80-pixel (80-character by 8-line) LCD display, a full-travel keyboard, and an external dual 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. A notable feature of the computer was its built-in thermal printer, which could also be purchased separately and attached to the machine. It is perhaps due to this attachment that the case design of the PC-5000 owes much to that of electronic typewriters of its time. While far more portable than the popular Compaq Portable or Osborne 1 computers, the machine weighed 5 kg (11 lb).
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If the computer lost power, it immediately starts up when power was restored. Also, this position disables the keyboard, mouse and floppy disk drive. The Workgroup Server 95 models include the "Workgroup Server PDS Card", which provides three capabilities: Two SCSI controllers with two internal SCSI connectors (plus one external connector); a DMS SCSI control chip that reduces I/O load on the main CPU; and 128 KB of SRAM which is used as an L2 cache. There are three additional slots that provide the ability further expand the L2 cache to 512 KB.
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By early 1985 much Macintosh software required 512K of memory. Apple sold an official memory upgrade for the Macintosh 128K, which included a motherboard replacement effectively making it a Macintosh 512K, for the price of US$995. Additionally, Apple offered an 800 KB floppy disk drive kit, including updated 128K ROMs. Finally, a Mac 128K could be upgraded to a Macintosh Plus by swapping the logic board as well as the case back (to accommodate the slightly different port configuration) and optionally adding the Macintosh Plus extended keyboard.
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"CRASH 28 - News which included the ZX Spectrum, for £5 million. This included Sinclair's unsold stock of Sinclair QLs and Spectrums. Amstrad made more than £5 million on selling these surplus machines alone. Amstrad launched two new variants of the Spectrum: the ZX Spectrum +2, based on the ZX Spectrum 128, with a built-in tape drive (like the CPC 464) and, the following year, the ZX Spectrum +3, with a built-in floppy disk drive (similar to the CPC 664 and 6128), taking the 3" discs that Amstrad CPC machines used.
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Similarly to a floppy drive, if bootable media is present in the ARMD drive, the BIOS will boot from it; if not, the BIOS will continue in the search order, usually with the hard drive last. There are two variants of ARMD, ARMD-FDD and ARMD-HDD. Originally ARMD caused the devices to appear as a sort of very large floppy drive, either the primary floppy drive device 00h or the secondary device 01h. Some operating systems required code changes to support floppy disks with capacities far larger than any standard floppy disk drive.
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The iMac was an immediate success, not only helping to revitalise Apple as a company, but also popularising new technologies at the time, such as USB, which would then go on to become an industry standard. The iMac also shipped without a floppy disk drive (rare for computers of the era), relying solely on the optical drive and new technologies such as USB and Firewire for data transfer. Rubinstein was responsible for both of these decisions. Future rollouts under Rubinstein's management included all subsequent upgrades (the G4 and G5) of the Power Mac series.
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All models featured a Cyrix Cx486SLC or 486SLC2 running at 33-50 MHz, and 4 MB to 8 MB of included EDO RAM. The ram was on a proprietary SIMM, and could only be upgraded to 12 MB maximum if the user had the compatible modules.thumbThe standard hard drive size was 100 or 200 MB, and all models had an internal 1.44 MB floppy disk drive. The series shipped with Windows 3.11 as the included operating system and could run up to Windows 95 as it met the minimum requirements.
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View of a European Commodore 1551 disk drive, showing the connector Rear view Adapter interior The Commodore 1551 (originally introduced as the SFS 481) is a floppy disk drive for the Commodore Plus/4 home computer. It resembles a charcoal-colored Commodore 1541 and plugs into the cartridge port, providing faster access than the C64/1541 combination. Commodore reportedly planned an interface to allow use of the 1551 with the C64, but it was never released. Aside from faster access, the drive is very similar to the 1541.
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A single frame of a typical decrunching screen The Amiga's floppy disk drive allowed 880 kilobytes on a single disk, comparable to the RAM of most Amigas (512 kilobytes to 1 megabyte). To increase capacity, Amiga used data compression. The disk drive had a slow transfer rate, such that using processor-based decompression could actually reduce loading times versus loading uncompressed data. Early implementations wrote to a video display register, causing it to break into multiple segments of colorful noise, which would become finer as the decrunching continued.
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Virtual memory was supported on all of the machines, although using cassettes for storage made it slow. 1978's MCM/900 was faster yet, included 24 kB RAM, and an included a monitor. The MCM/1000, also called the MCM Power was a repackaged /900, and was later repackaged again as the MCM MicroPower. The bigger change for the /900 and /1000 was to support the HDS-10 disk server, which included an 8.4 MB 8 inch Shugart hard drive, an 8-inch floppy disk drive, and a 64 k Zilog Z80 to control it.
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Later, both the Coco and the TDP System 100 shipped with a white case with ventilation slots running the length of the case rather than only the sides. This ventilation scheme was carried over to the CoCo 2. Some late versions of the CoCo have a modified keyboard, often referred to as the "melted" keyboard, with bigger keycaps. A number of peripherals were available: tape cassette storage, serial printers, a 5.25 inch floppy disk drive, a pen and graphics tablet called the X-Pad, speech and sound generators, and joysticks.
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Sample rate is variable from 10 kHz to 33 kHz with available sample time ranging from 2 to 6.5 seconds accordingly (for each keyboard half). It includes a built-in 3.5 inch SS/DD floppy disk drive, which is used to boot the operating system as well as to store samples and sequences. Each disk has a copy of the operating system and can be used as a boot disk, obviating the need for a separate boot disk. Each disk stores six samples and up to eight sequences.
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Devices with removable storage like older Yamaha music keyboards are also dependent on floppy disks, which require computers to process them. Newer devices are built with USB flash drive support. Floppy disk hardware emulators exist which effectively utilize the internal connections and physical attributes of a floppy disk drive to utilize a device where a USB flash drive emulates the storage space of a floppy disk in a solid state form, and can be divided into a number of individual virtual floppy disk images using individual data channels.
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Later, the Famicom Disk System was discontinued, supposedly because cartridge technology had caught up in capacity, but the influence of rampant piracy cannot be discounted. When the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was released, Hong Kong based companies were quick to cash in on the same idea. They produced cartridges that fit in the video game console's cartridge slot, but were interfaced with a floppy disk drive through a connecting cable. The copier, as they were called, also had a passthrough slot into which a real game could be inserted.
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The VFX-SD also added a floppy disk drive, for additional data archiving purposes, and are used for: single sounds, sets of 6 or sets of 30 sounds, whole banks (60 sounds), single presets, 20-presets bank, single sequence, whole songs etc. Very(!) versatile indeed. The format was proprietary to Ensoniq, but shared by the VFX, the EPS sampler and all later models, although cross-loading amongst different models was limited. Since it was not MS-DOS compatible, a niche industry sprang up to service the needs of musicians.
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Atari CX40-compatible joystick For the Commodore 64, Epyx made the Fast Load cartridge which enables a fivefold speedup of floppy disk drive accesses through Commodore's very slow serial interface. Another hardware product was the Epyx 500XJ Joystick, which uses high-quality microswitches and a more ergonomic form factor than the standard Atari CX40 joystick while remaining compatible. Starting in 1986, Epyx realized that the Commodore 64 was starting to show its age, and needed to think about the future of the company. They hired David Shannon Morse to explore the next generation of consoles and computers and to learn about their strengths.
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TXT, and if you first did an "ASSIGN FLOP: RXA2:" then the file would be created on physical device RXA2 (the second floppy disk drive). VAX/VMS and the Commodore Amiga's operating system AmigaOS (and other OSes built around Tripos) made considerable use of this very flexible feature. The SET command was capable of setting many system options, albeit by the crude method of patching locations in the system binary code. One of them, a command under OS-78, was SET SYS OS8, and it re-enabled the MONITOR commands that were not part of OS-78.
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8-inch, -inch, and -inch floppy disks A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium encased in a rectangular plastic carrier. It is read and written using a floppy disk drive (FDD). Floppy disks were an almost universal data format from the late 1970s into the 1990s, used for primary data storage as well as for backup and data transfers between computers. In 1967, at an IBM facility in San Jose (CA), work began on a drive that led to the world's first floppy disk and disk drive.
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It was also the first compact Mac to include a 1.44 MB high density floppy disk drive as standard (late versions of the SE had one, but earlier versions did not). The power of the SE/30 was demonstrated by its use to produce the This Week newspaper, the first colour tabloid newspaper in the UK to use new, digital pre-press technology on a personal, desktop computer. In keeping with Apple's practice, from the Apple II+ until the Power Macintosh G3 was announced, a logic board upgrade was available to convert a regular SE to an SE/30.
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Alan Shugart, after a distinguished career at IBM and a few years at Memorex, decided to strike out on his own in 1973; after gathering venture capital, he started Shugart Associates. The original business plan was to build a small- business system (similar to the IBM 3740IBM 3740 IBM Archives) dealing with the development of various major components, including floppy disk drives and printers. After two years, Shugart had exhausted his startup money and had no product to show for it. The board then wanted to focus on the floppy disk drive, but Shugart wished to continue the original plan.
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In addition to providing what The New York Times later described as "adult supervision" to the younger Jobs and Wozniak, as a trained engineer Markkula also possessed technical skills. He wrote several early Apple II programs, served as a beta tester for Apple hardware and software, and wrote one of the first three programs available for the unsuccessful Apple III. Wozniak was motivated to design the Disk II floppy disk drive system after Markkula found that a checkbook-balancing program he had written loaded too slowly from a data cassette. Markkula retired from Apple after Jobs returned as interim CEO in 1996.
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Atari also used this connector on their 16-bit computer range for attaching hard disk drives and the Atari laser printer, where it was known as both the ACSI (Atari Computer System Interface) port and the DMA bus port. The Commodore Amiga used an equally unusual 23-pin version for both its video output and connection to an external floppy disk drive. TASCAM used DB25 connectors for their multi- track recording audio equipment (TDIF), and Logitek Audio later did the same for its broadcast consoles, though with different pinouts. Roland used DB25 connectors for their multi-track recording audio equipment (R-BUS).
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CrossDOS was originally developed as a stand-alone commercial product by Consultron, which was available for AmigaOS 1.2 and 1.3. In 1992 Commodore included a version of CrossDOS with AmigaOS 2.1 (and with later versions), so that users could work with PC formatted disks. In fact, the bundled version will also work with version 2.0 of AmigaOS. The bundled CrossDOS replaced an obscure tool in earlier versions of AmigaOS that could access FAT formatted disks on a secondary floppy disk drive only (this tool was not a complete file system but a user program to read files from a FAT formatted disk).
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He traded the completed game to Apple Computer for a Centronics printer.An interview with Budge from Halcyon Days California Pacific published a collection of four of Budge's Apple II games in 1980 as Bill Budge's Space Album. By 1981, his reputation was such that BYTE wrote in its review of Budge's Tranquility Base, a Lunar Lander clone, that "Consistently excellent graphics are a trademark of Bill Budge's games". Budge marketed his games commercially with a floppy disk drive salesman who traveled from store to store; he and the salesman agreed to split profits of selling his games 50/50.
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This was joined in May 1978 by the 2647A programmable graphics terminal, which included its own BASIC interpreter. In October 1980, HP introduced the 2642A, which was like the 2645A, but instead of optional tape cartridges it had a standard 5.25-inch floppy disk drive storing 270 KB per diskette. The ultimate and final model in the 2640 series was the 2647F programmable graphics terminal introduced in June 1982, an improved replacement for the 2647A with the 2642A's floppy drive. Unlike the preceding terminals in the 264X family that had 8080A CPUs, the 2647F used the faster Intel 8085A running at 4.9 MHz.
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Infinite Loop The Apple II, also invented by Wozniak, was introduced on April 16, 1977, at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It differs from its major rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because of its character cell-based color graphics and open architecture. While early Apple II models use ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, they were superseded by the introduction of a -inch floppy disk drive and interface called the Disk II in 1978. The Apple II was chosen to be the desktop platform for the first "killer application" of the business world: VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program released in 1979.
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Commodore SX-64 Also in 1983, Commodore released the SX-64, a portable version of the C64. The SX-64 has the distinction of being the first full- color portable computer. While earlier computers using this form factor only incorporate monochrome ("green screen") displays, the base SX-64 unit features a color cathode ray tube (CRT) and one integrated 1541 floppy disk drive. While, in the advertisements for the computer it claimed it would have dual 1541 drives, but when the SX-64 was released there was only one and the other became a floppy disk storage slot.
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The Macintosh contained a single 400 KB, single-sided -inch floppy disk drive, dedicating no space to other internal mechanical storage. The Mac OS was disk-based from the beginning, as RAM had to be conserved, but this "Startup Disk" could still be temporarily ejected. (Ejecting the root filesystem remained an unusual feature of the classic Mac OS until System 7.) One floppy disk was sufficient to store the System Software, an application and the data files created with the application. Indeed, the 400 KB drive capacity was larger than the PC XT's 360 KB 5.25-inch drive.
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The ASR-10 featured a 3.5 inch floppy disk drive used with proprietary formatted disks capable of holding up to 1640K. (The decision to go with a proprietary format was to get around the then-limitation of DOS filenames which were limited to 8 characters.) There are many computer programs that allow reading, writing, and formatting Ensoniq's disk and file system, among those made by Chicken Systems (Translator and Disk Tools), and a German programmer named Thoralt who created ensoniqfs, a filesystem plugin for Total Commander. Ensoniq's architecture allowed a sound to be loaded from floppy while the keyboard was operational.
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While the direct sample loading facilities of the previous TS/ASR models were lost, a rare add-on card, called the MR-Flash, allowed the MR/ZR keyboards to load up to 4 mebibytes of samples into permanent flash ROM, via floppy disk drive. However, no sample library import facilities were offered, so existing ASR/TS owners couldn't use their sample files on the new machine. A drum machine with pro-quality mixable preset patterns, benefited from the unusually large internal drum sounds library (approx. 700 samples) and was integrated with the sequencer, but it was impossible to create patterns inside the machine.
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The LINK 480Z was an 8-bit microcomputer produced by Research Machines Limited in Oxford, England, during the early 1980s. The 480Z used a Z80 microprocessor with up to 256 KB of bank-switched RAM. The system could be used as a stand- alone unit with cassette-based storage and the BASIC programming language run from ROM, or it could boot CP/NOS (a network version of CP/M) over a local area network from a file server. When fitted with an optional external floppy disk drive the system could boot the CP/M operating system directly.
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Touted as "ergonomic" by Amstrad's promotional material, the keyboard is noticeably tilted to the front with MSX- style cursor keys above the numeric keypad. Compared to the CPC464's multicoloured keyboard, the CPC664's keys are kept in a much quieter grey and pale blue colour scheme. The back of the CPC664 main unit features the same connectors as the CPC464, with the exception of an additional 12V power lead. Unlike the CPC464's cassette tape drive that could be powered off the main unit's 5V voltage, the CPC664's floppy disk drive requires an additional 12V voltage.
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Disk storage (also sometimes called drive storage) is a general category of storage mechanisms where data is recorded by various electronic, magnetic, optical, or mechanical changes to a surface layer of one or more rotating disks. A disk drive is a device implementing such a storage mechanism. Notable types are the hard disk drive (HDD) containing a non-removable disk, the floppy disk drive (FDD) and its removable floppy disk, and various optical disc drives (ODD) and associated optical disc media. (The spelling disk and disc are used interchangeably except where trademarks preclude one usage, e.g.
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Amiga 1000 with external A1010 Floppy disk drive and A1060 Sidecar The Commodore A1060 Sidecar is an expansion hardware device developed by Commodore and released in 1986 for the Amiga 1000 computer. It features a complete PC XT-clone system mounted in an expansion case which connected to the expansion bus on the right side of the Amiga 1000 computer, sitting beside it similar to a motorcycle's sidecar, hence the name. The PC side of the Sidecar was built around an Intel 8088 processor. All I/O procedures from the PC side are performed by the Amiga.
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When Apple stopped bundling MacWrite, ownership was transferred to Claris, so developers could not distribute it on their programs' installation floppy disks. With no text program present on the disks, owners without a second floppy disk drive or hard disk could be left with no way to view documentation or installation instructions. Apple supplied TeachText as a small, freely-distributable program to address this need. TeachText could only operate on a single document at a time and supported only the default text font (12-point Geneva at the time) in the MacRoman encoding, with formatting such as bold, italic and underline.
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Both were widely used in the computer industry and the term "Molex connector" is often inaccurately used to refer to all nylon plugs and receptacles. The first 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, the Shugart SA400, introduced in August 1976, used the AMP Mate-n-Lok connector part number 350211-1. This connector became the standard for 5.25-inch format peripherals such as hard drives and was used until introduction of SATA drives. In 1983, Molex introduced the 8981 connector under the trademark Disk Drive Power Connection System, which was fully compatible with the AMP Mate-n-Lok connector.
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The HB-F9P was a Sony MSX2-computer, launched in 1985. The abbreviation HB stands for Hit Bit. The HB-F9P was unusual in the sense that it did not come with a built in floppy disk drive, instead it had a built in software suite "Memovision" that would run automatically unless a program cartridge was inserted in the cartridge slot or the GRAPH key was pressed during booting. Memovision could store data on the special HBI-55 (battery backed RAM) "data cartridge" that Sony originally had developed, for their HB-55 and HB-75 MSX1 computers.
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IBM Enters OEM Market For Winchester Disk Drives, Electronic News, September 14, 1981 By 1996, IBM had stopped making hard disk drives unique to its systems and was offering all its HDDs as an original equipment manufacturer (OEM).1996 Disk/Trend Report – Rigid Disk Drives, Specifications SectionIBM's disk drive family has three new members, INFOWORLD, October 17, 1994, p. 40 IBM uses many terms to describe its various magnetic disk drives, such as direct access storage device, disk file and diskette file. Here, the current industry standard terms, hard disk drive and floppy disk drive, are used.
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It was said to be investigating the potential of other animal actions to be used as defense for a 'family' of between 3 and 5 products, and re-interpreting the standing hard drive (an earlier artwork) as a portable floppy disk drive so as to fit in with the Attenborough Design Group's fictional timeline. The whimsical device's legs popped up when coffee was spilt on the table under it, keeping it out of harm's way. The video on Vimeo shows the radio sneezing, visibly expelling dust through its front.Gesundheit Radio on Vimeo, showing the artwork's "sneeze" mechanism.
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The original Tandy 1000 was a large computer almost the size of the , though with a plastic case over an aluminium lower chassis to reduce weight. It came standard with one internal 5.25" double-density floppy disk drive, with an additional exposed internal bay usable for the installation of a second 5.25" disk drive (available as a kit from Radio Shack). The floppy drives used jumpers to select the drive number instead of the IBM cable twist. of memory was standard, with the computer accepting up to of total memory with the addition of expansion cards.
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Disk editors for home computers of the 1980s were often included as part of utility software packages on floppies or cartridges. The latter had the advantage of being instantly available at power-on and after resets, instead of having to be loaded or reloaded on the same disk drive that later would hold the floppy to be edited (the majority of home computer users possessed only one floppy disk drive at that time). Having the disk editor on cartridge also helped the user avoid editing/damaging the disk editor application disk by mistake. All disk editors strive to be better than `DEBUG` contained in all DOS versions.
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DEC disk platters DEC was both a manufacturer and a buyer of magnetic disk storage, offering more than 100 different models of hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD) during its existence.DEC disk history In the 1970s, it was the single largest OEM purchaser of HDDs, procuring from Diablo, Control Data Corporation, Information Storage Systems, and Memorex, among others. DEC's first internally developed HDD was the RS08, a 256 kWord fixed-head contact-start-stop drive using plated media; it shipped in 1969. Beginning in the 1970s, DEC moved first its HDD manufacturing and then its mass storage development labs to Colorado Springs.
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PC-9801F motherboard The first model, the PC-9801, launched in October 1982, Reprinted from and employed an 8086 CPU. It ran at a clock speed of 5 MHz, with two µPD7220 display controllers (one for text, the other for video graphics), and was shipped with 128 KB of RAM that could be expanded to 640 KB. Its 8-color display had a maximum resolution of 640×400 pixels. When the PC-9801 launched in 1982, it was initially priced at 298,000 yen (about US$1,200 in 1982 dollars). This model required an expensive 8-inch floppy disk drive or smaller capacity of 320 KB 5¼-inch floppy drive.
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Manufactured exclusively for use with the Macintosh PowerBook line, the Macintosh HDI-20 External 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive (M8061) contained a low- powered, slimmer version of the SuperDrive and used a small square HDI-20HDI-20 proprietary connector, rather than the larger standard DE-19 desktop connector, and was powered directly by the laptop. It had a matching dark gray case and an access cover which flipped down to form a stand. The external drive was sold optionally for those PowerBooks which had no built-in drive, however, the identical drive mechanism was included internally in some PowerBook models, which otherwise had no provision to accommodate an external drive.
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Sentry Firewall is a free open-source network firewall Linux distribution that was first published in 2001 and has been the subject of multiple magazine reviews.Linux Journal Magazine, "Focus on Software, Security Applications"Linux Magazine, "Sentry Firewall CD - Simple Safety", May 2004 issue, page 56 (print only) The distribution is particularly notable because it consists solely of a bootable CD-ROM that is designed to be used in a computer with no hard disk. Configuration information is retrieved at boot time by automatically searching on an attached floppy disk drive, USB flash memory drive, or another server on the local network willing to provide the configuration.
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The Linn 9000 has eighteen 8-bit 11 kHz ~ 37 kHz digitally sampled drum sounds: bass, snare, sidestick, hihat, two crash cymbals, two ride cymbals, four toms, cabasa, tambourine, high and low congas, cowbell and clap. The Linn 9000 had many firsts. In addition to being the first drum machine to incorporate a MIDI sequencer, it was the first drum machine with custom sounds, sampling capability (optional), a floppy disk drive (optional) and an LCD display. The programmable hi-hat decay is a unique feature that provides seven open hi-hat positions in addition to the closed hi-hat, allowing for subtle and expressive performances.
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Most models in the 360 series shipped with Windows 3.11 as the included operating system, while some such as the 360P and PE shipped with IBM DOS 6.3 and PenDOS 2.2. All models in the series featured an Intel 486SX or DX2 possessor running at 33 to 50 MHz, and a WD90C24A2 or WD90C24 video controller with 1 MB of video memory. A standard of 4 MB RAM was installed, which was soldered onto the motherboard. The ram could be upgraded to up to 20 MB in total if the user had a IC DRAM Card, which goes into a slot under the floppy disk drive.
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All three used MFM encoding, a widely used coding scheme. A subsequent extension of the ST412 interface, the ST412HP interface, used RLL encoding for a 50% increase in capacity and bit rate. The ST506 drive connected to a computer system through a disk controller. The ST506 interface between the controller and drive was derived from the Shugart Associates SA1000 interface,the principal difference was that the data rate was increased from 4.34 to 5.00 Mbit/s. which was in turn based upon the floppy disk drive interface,"Simplify system design with a single controller for Winchester/floppy combo," Electronic Design, October 25, 1979, pp. 76–80.
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The VTech Laser 128 has 128 KB of RAM. Like the Apple IIc, it is a one-piece semi-portable design with a carrying handle and a single built-in 5¼-inch floppy disk drive, uses the 65C02 microprocessor, and supports Apple II graphics. Unlike the Apple IIc, it has a numeric keypad, a Centronics printer port, and two Laser 128-only graphics modes. The Laser 128 also has a single Apple IIe-compatible expansion slot, which gives it better expansion capabilities than a IIc, but cards remain exposed; the slot is intended for an $80 expansion chassis with two slots compatible with the Apple's Slot 5 and Slot 7.
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This was a tremendous advance for the independent developers who could not possibly access the financial resources to publish software boxes across the country and the world, in order to reach their audience. The NeXT Computer initially came without a floppy disk drive, which created an urgent need to invent a new form of software distribution. The AppWrapper contained all kinds of various types of software, including general third party applications, music and media. The invention was part of a movement to protect the rights of third party developers and distribute software without the expense of printing manuals and delivering boxes, something that today is seen universally as then norm.
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Official system requirements for Visi On were: #512K of User Memory #RS232 Serial Port #5 Megabyte Hard Disk #1 Floppy Disk Drive, DS/DD, 40 Track, 48 tpi #VisiCorp Mouse #MS DOS 2.0 #Graphics Adapter #Graphics Monitor It will work on newer PCs, but requires a compatible mouse and hard disk partition under 15MB as only the FAT12 file system is supported. In addition, as it revectors some IRQs used by PC/ATs and later, VISIONXT.EXE requires modifications which prevent Graph and other applications from functioning properly. Visi On required Mouse Systems-compatible mice; Microsoft-compatible PC mice, which over time became the standard, were introduced later (in May 1983).
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The basic system contained an 8 MHz Intel 80286 CPU with 1 Mbyte of RAM, a 1.2 MB RX33 5¼-inch floppy disk drive, a 14-inch (diagonal) amber or green monochrome CRT and a thinwire Ethernet interface all contained in the system unit. It was also provided with a parallel printer port and a serial communications port. A separate mouse and LK250 keyboard was used with the device. As well as the expansion box, an 80287 numeric coprocessor could be ordered as an option, and the memory could be expanded by 2 MB with another option to 3 MB. In North America, an internal modem was also available.
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Most of the hard drives which were available on the market used the slower serial port to transfer data per Apple's specifications. Apple instead engineered the HD 20 to use the faster floppy disk port, enabling the user to daisy-chain an external floppy disk drive as well as an additional HD 20. With few exceptions, this along with complete compatibility with the new Hierarchical File System, gave Apple an instant edge over the competition. In addition, the HD 20 had a convenient "zero-footprint" design which fit precisely underneath the Macintosh, merely elevating it 3 inches, but otherwise taking up no more desk-space.
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Apple's decision to not update the Classic with newer technology such as a newer CPU, higher RAM capacity or color display resulted in criticism from reviewers, with Macworld describing it as having "nothing to gloat about beyond its low price" and "unexceptional". But, it ensured compatibility with the Mac's by-then healthy software base as well as enabled it to fit the lower price Apple intended for it. Nevertheless, the Classic featured several improvements over the aging Macintosh Plus, which it replaced as Apple's low-end Mac computer. It was up to 25 percent faster than the Plus and included an Apple SuperDrive floppy disk drive as standard.
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Although there are many demos made for the 48K Spectrums,Demotopia most current Spectrum demos require the additional features found in the Spectrum 128K, that is, 128 KiB of RAM and the AY-3-8912 sound chip. Also, many demos have been designed to run from a floppy disk rather than a cassette tape. In many eastern European countries, the various Spectrum clones used to be more common than the original models, a fact that also reflects in the choices of hardware among the demoscene. For example, on most Russian demoscene events, the standard "compo Spectrum" is the Pentagon 128 with a floppy disk drive.
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In addition an external floppy disk drive may also be connected, making the SE the only Macintosh besides the Macintosh Portable which could support three floppy drives, though its increased storage, RAM capacity and optional internal hard drive rendered the external drives less of a necessity than for its predecessors. Single-floppy SE models also featured a drive-access light in the spot where the second floppy drive would be. Hard-drive equipped models came with a 20 MB SCSI hard disk. Battery: Soldered into the logic board is a 3.6 V 1/2AA lithium battery, which must be present in order for basic settings to persist between power cycles.
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Disk II drives The Disk II Floppy Disk Subsystem, often rendered as Disk ][, is a -inch floppy disk drive designed by Steve Wozniak and manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. It went on sale in June 1978 at a retail price of US$495 for pre-order; it was later sold for $595 () including the controller card (which can control up to two drives) and cable. The Disk II was designed specifically for use with the Apple II personal computer family to replace the slower cassette tape storage. These floppy drives cannot be used with any Macintosh without an Apple IIe Card as doing so will damage the drive or the controller.
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A proprietary riser card interface (referred to by Apple as an X-PCI slot) is located on the bottom of a Pippin system and is used by docking stations. A docking station for a Pippin can contain a variety of hardware, such as SCSI or floppy disk drive controllers, video interfaces, codecs, or network interfaces such as Ethernet. The logic board passes PCI signals through the X-PCI docking interface, and then to the docking station.X-PCI to PCI pin-out diagram Docking stations within the Pippin line do not provide pass-through support, thereby limiting a Pippin system to use only one docking station at one time.
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Former SDS employees restarted the company with funding from Max Palevsky, Sanford Kaplan, Dan McGurk, and others in 1979. Jack Mitchell, William L. Scheding, and Henry Harold, along with some other former SDS engineers introduced a microprocessor-based computer called the SDS-420 built on a 6502A-based processor design with up to 56KB of memory and a proprietary OS, SDS-DOS, along with the BASIC programming language from Microsoft. The SDS-420 featured a dual single-sided-double-density (400KB per side) floppy disk drive, Model 70, manufactured by PerSci (Peripheral Sciences), of Santa Monica and Marina del Rey, California. The SDS-422 Model offered some of the first dual double- sided-double-density floppy drives.
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The 600XL was essentially the Liz NY model, and the spiritual replacement for the 400, while the 800XL would replace both the 800 and 1200XL. The machines looked similar to the 1200XL, but were smaller back to front, the 600 being somewhat smaller as it lacked one row of memory chips on the circuit board. The high-end 1400XL added a built-in 300 baud modem and a voice synthesizer, and the 1450XLD also included a built-in double-sided floppy disk drive in an enlarged case, with a slot for a second drive. The machines had Atari BASIC built into the ROM of the computer and the PBI at the back that allowed external expansion.
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Rodime was an electronics company specialising in hard disks, based in Glenrothes, Scotland. It was founded in 1979 by several Scottish and American former employees of Burroughs Corporation and listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1986, becoming Rodime PLC. Rodime produced a wide range of hard disks, initially 5¼-inch form-factor ST506-compatible devices, but later launching the world's first 3½-inch hard disk, as well as producing SCSI and ATA drives. Of particular note, Rodime produced the hard disks used in Apple Computer's first external hard drive for the Macintosh, the Macintosh Hard Disk 20, which connected to the external floppy disk drive port found on Macintosh computers from that period.
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The Commodore 1581 is a 3½-inch double-sided double-density floppy disk drive that was released by Commodore Business Machines (CBM) in 1987, primarily for its C64 and C128 home/personal computers. The drive stores 800 kilobytes using an MFM encodingtds.net - 1581 DISK DRIVE DIAGNOSTICS, latest updates and corrections 7-13-05 but formats different from the MS-DOS (720 kB), Amiga (880 kB), and Mac Plus (800 kB) formats. With special software it's possible to read C1581 disks on an x86 PC system, and likewise, read MS-DOS and other formats of disks in the C1581 (using Big Blue Reader), provided that the PC or other floppy handles the size format.
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IBM Cassette BASIC came in 32 kilobytes (KB) of read-only memory (ROM), separate from the 8 KB BIOS ROM of the original IBM PC, and did not require an operating system to run. Cassette BASIC provided the default user interface invoked by the BIOS through INT 18h if there was no floppy disk drive installed, or if the boot code did not find a bootable floppy disk at power up. The name Cassette BASIC came from its use of cassette tapes rather than floppy disks to store programs and data. Cassette BASIC was built into the ROMs of the original PC and XT, and early models in the PS/2 line.
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Some commentators began to compile rather large lists of continuity errors. The engineering areas of the ship were filmed in an industrial building with un-futuristic brick walls, windows and concrete floors, while the bridge looks remarkably like a vintage-1980s corporate office (non-shag, neutral carpeting; white particleboard desks; computers with 16-color ANSI displays, including one with a 5¼ inch floppy disk drive as an ID card reader). Kalgan's "torture chamber" set features contemporary computer keyboards inexplicably mounted on the walls. The characters tend to wear the silver or white lamé outfits that were common to science fiction/futurist productions of the time, while many of the female characters wear spandex leotards.
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In addition, the Lisa 2's new front faceplate accommodates the reconfigured floppy disk drive, and it includes the new inlaid Apple logo and the first Snow White design language elements. The Lisa 2/10 has a 10MB internal hard drive (but no external parallel port) and a standard configuration of 1MB of RAM. Developing early Macintosh software required a Lisa 2. There were relatively few third- party hardware offerings for the Lisa, as compared to the earlier Apple II. AST offered a 1.5 MB memory board, which – when combined with the standard Apple 512 KB memory board – expands the Lisa to a total of 2 MB of memory, the maximum amount that the MMU can address.
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This meant color graphics could be viewed using a standard European monitor or TV set, rather than having to import an NTSC monitor from America or Japan as was the case for the Apple II. ITT sold this computer for a few years, starting in 1979. When Apple Computer started shipping the Apple II Europlus, ITT withdrew from the market, although the Europlus did not support color. ITT also supplied a 140kB single-sided floppy disk drive that was identical to the Apple II disk drive, supporting 13 sectors under DOS 3.2 on a floppy disk. They never supplied the upgraded 360kB double-sided double density drive supporting 16 sectors under DOS 3.3.
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However, aside from the initial Commodore cartridges, very few cartridge-based games were released for the Commodore. Most third-party game cartridges came from Llamasoft, Activision, and Atarisoft, however some of these games found their way into disk and tape versions too. Only later, when the failed C64GS console was produced, did cartridges make a brief comeback, including the production of a few more cartridge-only games. Crackers managed to port these games to disk later on. While the 1541 floppy disk drive quickly became universal in the US, in Europe it was common for prepackaged commercial game software to either come on floppy disk or cassette-tape format, and sometimes both.
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Four 100 MHz RAM slots accept PC100 SDRAM modules, allowing the installation of up to 1 GB of RAM with the use of 256 MB DIMMs. The onboard ATA was upgraded to Ultra ATA/33 (an extra UDMA-33 controller was also added), but SCSI was no longer present, having been replaced by two FireWire ports, a new standard (IEEE1394) running at 400 Mbit/s (50 MB/s) — faster in theory than even the ATA/33 (33 MB/s) hard drive controller. The serial ports were replaced with USB 1.1 ports (12 Mbit/s), and the floppy disk drive was removed altogether. The ADB port remained, as did the option for an internal modem.
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The Datapoint 2200 had a built-in full-travel keyboard, a built-in 12-line, 80-column green screen monitor, and two 47 character-per-inch cassette tape drives each with 130 KB capacity. Its size, , and shape--a box with protruding keyboard--approximated that of an IBM Selectric typewriter. Initially, a Diablo 2.5 MB 2315-type removable cartridge hard disk drive was available, along with modems, several types of serial interface, parallel interface, printers and a punched card reader. Later, an 8-inch floppy disk drive was also made available, along with other, larger hard disk drives. An industry-compatible 7/9-track (user selectable) magnetic tape drive was available by 1975.
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Windows 95 ushered in the importance of the CD-ROM drive in mobile computing, and helped the shift to the Intel Pentium processor as the base platform for notebooks. The Gateway Solo was the first notebook introduced with a Pentium processor and a CD-ROM. Also featuring a removable hard disk drive and floppy drive, the Solo was the first three-spindle (optical, floppy, and hard disk drive) notebook computer, and was extremely successful within the consumer segment of the market. In roughly the same time period the Dell Latitude, Toshiba Satellite, and IBM ThinkPad were reaching great success with Pentium-based two-spindle (hard disk and floppy disk drive) systems directed toward the corporate market.
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The IIsi's case design is a compact desktop unit not used for any other Macintosh model, one of the few Macintosh designs for which this is true. Positioned below the Macintosh IIci as Apple's entry-level professional model, the IIsi's price was lowered by the redesign of the motherboard substituting a different memory controller and the deletion of all but one of the expansion card slots (a single Processor Direct Slot) and removal of the level 2 cache slot. It shipped with either a 40-MB or 80-MB internal hard disk, and a 1.44-MB floppy disk drive. The MC 68882 FPU was an optional upgrade, mounted on a special plug-in card.
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The most popular computers of the 1990s such as the Apple II and IBM PC had published schematic diagrams and other documentation which permitted rapid reverse-engineering and third-party replacement motherboards. Usually intended for building new computers compatible with the exemplars, many motherboards offered additional performance or other features and were used to upgrade the manufacturer's original equipment. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, it became economical to move an increasing number of peripheral functions onto the motherboard. In the late 1980s, personal computer motherboards began to include single ICs (also called Super I/O chips) capable of supporting a set of low-speed peripherals: keyboard, mouse, floppy disk drive, serial ports, and parallel ports.
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Self-modifying code was used to hide copy protection instructions in 1980s disk-based programs for platforms such as IBM PC and Apple II. For example, on an IBM PC (or compatible), the floppy disk drive access instruction 'int 0x13' would not appear in the executable program's image but it would be written into the executable's memory image after the program started executing. Self-modifying code is also sometimes used by programs that do not want to reveal their presence, such as computer viruses and some shellcodes. Viruses and shellcodes that use self-modifying code mostly do this in combination with polymorphic code. Modifying a piece of running code is also used in certain attacks, such as buffer overflows.
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8-inch, -inch, and -inch floppy disks 8-inch, -inch (full height), and -inch drives A -inch floppy disk removed from its housing A floppy disk or floppy diskette (sometimes casually referred to as a floppy or diskette) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk. Floppy disks are read from and written to by a floppy disk drive (FDD). The first floppy disks, invented and made by IBM, had a disk diameter of . Subsequently and then inch (90 mm) became a ubiquitous form of data storage and transfer into the first years of the 21st century.
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Shugart's eventual downfall came about partially as a result of the company failing to develop a reliable 80-track disk drive. In 1983 the company changed its name to Shugart Corporation. Shugart's operating losses in 1984 along with Xerox's own troubles led Xerox to conclude in 1985 that Shugart businesses were no longer strategically important, resulting in a decision to close down Shugart rather than invest in recovery. Most of Shugart's businesses were shut down afterwards; however its floppy disk drive business was sold in March 1986 to Narlinger, which promptly rebranded itself as Shugart Corporation Under the management of Narlinger, Shugart acquired several discontinued product lines such as Tandon's 8-inch floppy drives (1986) and the Optotech 5984 Write Once Read Many (WORM) drive (1988).
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Uemura analyzed the innards of rival consoles, including the Atari 2600 and Magnavox Odyssey, but found that their primitive technology would not be helpful in creating a new console. He initially thought of using a modern 16-bit CPU, but instead settled on the inexpensive MOS Technology 6502, supplementing it with a custom graphics chip (the Picture Processing Unit). To keep costs down, suggestions of including a keyboard, modem, and floppy disk drive were rejected, but expensive circuitry was added to provide a versatile 15-pin expansion port connection on the front of the console for future add-on functionality such as peripheral devices. The keyboard, Famicom Modem, and Famicom Disk System would later be released as add-on peripherals, all utilizing the Famicom expansion port.
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Besides their prominent usage on video game consoles, ROM cartridges have also been used on a small number of electronic musical instruments, particularly electronic keyboards. Yamaha has made several models with such features, with their DX synthesizer in the 1980s, such as the DX1, DX5 and DX7 and their PSR keyboard lineup in the mid-1990s, namely the PSR-320, PSR-420, PSR-520, PSR-620, PSR-330, PSR-530 and the PSR-6000. These keyboards use specialized cards known as Music Cartridges, a ROM cartridge simply containing MIDI data to be played on the keyboard as MIDI sequence or song data. This technology, however, quickly become obsolete and extremely rare after the advent of floppy disk drive in later models.
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The LinnDrum Midistudio has sixteen 8-bit 10 kHz ~ 50 kHz digitally sampled drum sounds: bass, snare, cross stick, hihat, two crash symbols, two ride symbols, four toms, cabasa, tambourine, cowbell and clap. The Midistudio has virtually all the same features as the Linn 9000. Also, many optional 9000 features (like digital sampling capability and a floppy disk drive) are standard on the Midistudio. Both machines have large (1.25-inch-square) velocity- and pressure-sensitive rubber performance pads. But the 9000 has 18 pads in a three-high by six-wide pattern, where the Midistudio has 16 pads in the distinctive, four-by-four pattern, that would become the hallmark of the Akai MPC series of Music Production Centers, starting with the Akai MPC60.
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Though the RAM was still permanently soldered to the logic board, the new design allowed for easier (though unsanctioned) third-party upgrades to 512 KB. In addition, most of the newer models contained the 1984 revision B of the ROM to accommodate changes in the 400 KB floppy disk drive. System software contains support for an unreleased Macintosh 256K. The increased RAM of the 512K was vitally important for the Macintosh as it finally allowed for more powerful software applications, such as the then-popular program Microsoft Multiplan. However, Apple continued to market the 128K for over a year as an entry-level computer, the mid-level 512K and high-end Lisa (and claiming that it could be easily expanded should the user ever need more RAM).
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The members of the ST family are listed below, in roughly chronological order: ; 520ST: Original model with 512 KB RAM, external power supply, no floppy disk drive. The early models had only a bootstrap ROM and TOS had to be loaded from disk. ; 520ST+: early 520STs with 1 MB of RAM, but without floppy disk ; 260ST: originally intended to be a 256 kB variant, but actually sold in small quantities in Europe with 512 KB. Used after the release of the 520ST+ to differentiate the cheaper 512 KB models from the 1 MB models. Because the early 520ST's were sold with TOS on disk, but this used up 192 KB or RAM so the machine only had around 256KB left.
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In fact, even for the Macintosh 512K to use the drive, it required an additional file in the System Folder on a special startup disk which added additional code into memory during startup. An ingenious startup routine also allowed the Mac to check for the presence of a System file on the Hard Disk, switch over to it and eject the startup disk. Unfortunately, the HD 20 could not be used as a startup disk directly without first loading the code from the floppy disk drive. With the release of the Macintosh Plus and the Macintosh 512Ke, both containing the upgraded 128 kB ROM which contained the additional code, the HD 20 could finally be used alone as a startup disk.
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Disk swapping refers to the practice of inserting and removing, or swapping, floppy disks in a floppy disk drive-based computer system. In the early days of personal computers, before hard drives became commonplace, most fully outfitted computer systems had two floppy drives (addressed as A: and B: on CP/M and MS-DOS--other systems had different conventions). Disk drives were expensive, however, and having two was seen as a luxury by many computer users who had to make do with a single drive. The purpose of two floppy drives was so that the disk containing the application program could remain in the drive while the data disk containing the user's files could be accessed in the second drive.
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It was also the first PowerBook with AirPort networking as an official option (although it could be added to the earlier models via various third-party CardBus cards). The Pismo can be upgraded with additional RAM (officially 512 MB with then-available RAM, but it accepts 1 gigabyte) and a larger hard drive (up to 120 GB). Brighter screens and replacement batteries were also available. The left expansion bay, like the Lombard, could only take a battery, but the right bay was able to accommodate a tray-loading or slot- loading Combo Drive or SuperDrive, a Zip 100 drive, a Zip 250 drive, an LS-120 SuperDisk drive, a VST floppy disk drive, a second hard drive (with adapter, which was tough to find), or a second battery.
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The original F series was launched with four models: the F160, F180 and F190 featured an active matrix 14.1" 1024x768 screen, while the base F150 model offered only a passive-matrix 13.0" 1024x768 screen. All four featured Pentium II processors from 300 MHz to 366 MHz, between 32MB and 64MB of RAM, a 4.3 or 6.4GB hard drive, 56k built-in modem, a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, and optional second battery/removable floppy disk drive. The weight of F1- 14.1" models with floppy drive removed was 3.1 kg. The successor models, launched mid-1999 were the F250, F270 and F290, each with 1024x768 resolution, and 13.0", 14.1" or 15.0" screens respectively, plus improved hardware specifications. F3xx, F4xx, F5xx and finally F6xx (the last in October 2000) models were also released.
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The Sony Vaio 700 series were Sony's first Vaio branded laptops, starting with the 705 and 707 models, launched in Japan on July 1, 1997, and subsequently in the United States. The 700 series featured removable 3.5" floppy disk drive, removable 14x CD-ROM, 33.6kbit/s integrated modem, 12.1" screen, 2.1GB hard disk drive, 2MB VRAM, 128MB maximum RAM, IrDA port, lithium-ion battery, with optional second battery and an optional docking station with firewire, USB, mouse, keyboard, ethernet and SCSI. The launch models offered an 800x600 screen (705) or 1024x768 screen (707), 256KB cache, 16MB (705) or 32MB (707) RAM a Pentium 1 MMX 150 or 166 MHz CPU, and Windows 95 pre-installed. The weight with single battery, and CD and floppy disc drive removed was 2.4 kg.
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There were only two clones of the Apple IIe, since it used custom IC chips that could not be copied, and therefore had to be reversed-engineered and developed in the country. These clones were the TK3000 IIe by Microdigital and Exato IIe by CCE. In addition, the Laser IIc was manufactured by Milmar and, despite the name, was a clone of the Apple II Plus, not of the Apple IIc, although it had a design similar to that of the Apple IIc, with an integrated floppy controller and 80-column card, but without an integrated floppy disk drive. The Ace clones from Franklin Computer Corporation were the best known Apple II clones and had the most lasting impact, as Franklin copied Apple's ROMs and software and freely admitted to doing so.
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The PCW 8256 was launched in September 1985, and had 256 KB of RAM and one floppy disk drive. Launched a few months later, the PCW 8512 had 512 KB of RAM and two floppy disk drives. Both systems consisted of three units: a printer; a keyboard; and a monochrome CRT monitor whose casing included the processor, memory, motherboard, one or two floppy disk drives, the power supply for all the units and the connectors for the printer and keyboard. The monitor displayed green characters on a black background. It measured diagonally, and showed 32 lines of 90 characters each. The designers preferred this to the usual personal computer display of 25 80-character lines, as the larger size would be more convenient for displaying a whole letter.
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Ribbon cable with three connectors Ribbon cables are usually specified by two numbers: the spacing or pitch of the conductors, and the number of conductors or ways. A spacing of 0.05 inch (1.27 mm) is the most usual, allowing for a two-row connector with a pin spacing of 0.1 inch (2.54 mm). These types are used for many types of equipment, in particular for interconnections within an enclosure. For personal computers, this size is used today in floppy-disk-drive cables and older or custom Parallel ATA cables. Based on availability of standard connectors, the number of conductors is usually restricted to a few values, These include 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 24, 25, 26, 34, 37, 40, 50, 60, 64 and 80.
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Disk IIc drive.The Disk IIc (A2M4050) was a half-height -inch floppy disk drive introduced by Apple Computer in 1984 styled for use alongside the Apple IIc personal computer, the only Apple II to contain a -inch built-in disk drive mechanism. The disk port on the original IIc was only designed to control one additional, external -inch disk drive, and as such, this particular drive omitted a daisy-chain port in back. It was possible to use it on other Apple II models, so long as it came last in the chain of drive devices (due to lacking a daisy-chain port); but since the Disk IIc was sold without a controller card, the Apple IIc computer needing none, it had to be adapted to an existing Disk II controller card in this case.
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However, HFS was not widely introduced until it was included in the 128K ROM that debuted with the Macintosh Plus in January 1986 along with the larger 800 KB floppy disk drive for the Macintosh that also used HFS. The introduction of HFS was the first advancement by Apple to leave a Macintosh computer model behind: the original 128K Macintosh, which lacked sufficient memory to load the HFS code and was promptly discontinued. In 1998, Apple introduced HFS Plus to address inefficient allocation of disk space in HFS and to add other improvements. HFS is still supported by current versions of Mac OS, but starting with Mac OS X, an HFS volume cannot be used for booting, and beginning with Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), HFS volumes are read-only and cannot be created or updated.
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Management believed that "once the Apple III was out, the Apple II would stop selling in six months", Wozniak said. The Apple III is powered by a 1.8-megahertz Synertek 6502A or B 8-bit CPU and, like some of the later machines in the Apple II family, uses bank switching techniques to address memory beyond the 6502's traditional 64 kB limit, up to 256 kB in the III's case. Third-party vendors produced memory upgrade kits that allow the Apple III to reach up to 512 kB of random-access memory (RAM). Other Apple III built-in features include an 80-column, 24-line display with upper and lowercase characters, a numeric keypad, dual-speed (pressure- sensitive) cursor control keys, 6-bit (DAC) audio, and a built-in 140-kilobyte 5.25-inch floppy disk drive.
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The BASIC was compatible with the Video Genie I and II and the TRS-80, except for graphic and sound commands; most of the routines for Video Genie I BASIC commands were left over in the Colour Genie's BASIC ROM. Programs were provided to load TRS-80 programs into the Colour Genie. Colour Genie disks could be read in a TRS-80 floppy disk drive and vice versa, editing the pdrive commands. The original Video Genies had been based upon (and broadly compatible with) the then-current TRS-80 Model I. As the Colour Genie was descended from this architecture, it was incompatible with Tandy's newer TRS-80 Color Computer which - despite its name - was an entirely new and unrelated design based on an entirely different CPU, and thus incompatible with the TRS-80 Model I and derivatives such as the Color Genie.
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The CD32 can be enhanced using these devices: ProModule, Paravision SX-1, DCE SX-32 (which optionally includes 68030 CPU) and Terrible Fire's TF328 and TF330 (which add 2.5" IDE, keyboard connector and 8Mb/64mb of Fastmem). Those devices extend the capabilities of the Amiga CD32, allowing it to utilize hardware such as an external 3.5" floppy disk drive, hard disk and IBM PC keyboard (a CD32-branded keyboard was officially released however, which used the AUX port on the left of the machine). An Amiga CD32 can be turned into a de facto Amiga 1200 via the addition of third-party packages. The SX-1 appears to have been designed around Commodore's mechanical specs and not the actual production units – it did not fit very well and requires an internal "modification" to equip it properly. Consequently, the SX-1 can be jarred loose if the console is not handled gently.
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1531 tape recorder with tapes. The TED offered 121-color (15 colors × 8 luminance levels + black) video, a palette matched only by Atari's 8-bit computer line and the Enterprise at the time, and 320×200 video resolution, similar to many computers intended to be capable of connecting to a television. The Plus/4's memory map, which used bank switching far more extensively than the C64, gave it a 56% larger amount of user-accessible memory than the C64 for programming in BASIC, and its BASIC programming language was vastly improved, adding sound and graphics commands as well as looping commands that improved program structure. Commodore released a high-speed floppy disk drive for the Plus/4, the Commodore 1551, which offered much better performance than the C64/1541 combination because it used a parallel interface rather than a serial bus. The 1551 plugged into the cartridge port.
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A stylized illustration of a desktop personal computer, consisting of a case (containing the motherboard and processor), a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse A desktop computer is a personal computer designed for regular use at a single location on or near a desk or table due to its size and power requirements. The most common configuration has a case that houses the power supply, motherboard (a printed circuit board with a microprocessor as the central processing unit (CPU), memory, bus, and other electronic components, disk storage (usually one or more hard disk drives, solid state drives, optical disc drives, and in early models a floppy disk drive); a keyboard and mouse for input; and a computer monitor, speakers, and, often, a printer for output. The case may be oriented horizontally or vertically and placed either underneath, beside, or on top of a desk.
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In CP/M, attempting to read a floppy disk drive with the door open would hang until a disk was inserted and the disk drive door was closed (very early disk hardware did not send any kind of signal until a disk was spinning, and a timeout to detect the lack of signal required too much code on these tiny systems). Many users of CP/M became accustomed to this as a method of managing multiple disks, by opening the disk drive to stop a program from reading or writing a file until the correct disk could be inserted. A primary design consideration for PC DOS was that software written for CP/M be portable to DOS without changes. Even the first IBM PC had hardware that told the operating system that the disk drive door was open, but returning an error to software trying to read the disk would break the ability to manage disks this way without such changes.
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Originally designed to operate on 12 standard C cell flashlight batteries for portability, when Atari finally realized how quickly the machine would use up a set of batteries (especially when rechargeable batteries of the time supplied insufficient power compared to the intended alkalines), they simply glued the lid of the battery compartment shut. ; ST BOOK: a later portable ST, more portable than the STacy, but sacrificing several features in order to achieve this notably the backlight and internal floppy disk drive. Files were meant to be stored on a small amount (one megabyte) of internal flash memory 'on the road' and transferred using serial or parallel links, memory flashcards or external (and externally powered) floppy disk to a desktop ST once back indoors. The screen is highly reflective for the time, but still hard to use indoors or in low light, it is fixed to the 640 × 400 1-bit mono mode, and no external video port was provided.
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There are an additional 32 user memory locations to store user configurable performances. There is a built-in backlit LCD display of 320 by 80 pixels. The onboard sequencer is capable of storing up to 60,000 notes of recorded musical performance and has a clock resolution of 96 parts per quarter note. It's capable of storing up to 100 patterns and 1 song at a time in memory, but can also load and play music sequences directly from floppy disk using the built-in floppy disk drive. The XP-80 includes 4 user accessible expansion slots (located under a removable cover on the bottom of the unit). Each slot can accommodate one SR-JV80 expansion board. A total of 21 SR-JV80 expansion boards were released by Roland. Nineteen were sold (SR-JV80-01 through SR-JV80-19), while 2 were given away as demonstration expansion boards for various promotions (SR-JV80-98 and SR-JV80-99).
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The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research. Referred to during development as the ZX81 Colour and ZX82, it was launched as the ZX Spectrum by Sinclair to highlight the machine's colour display, compared with the black and white display of its predecessor, the ZX81. The Spectrum was released as eight different models, ranging from the entry level with 16 KB RAM released in 1982 to the ZX Spectrum +3 with 128 KB RAM and built in floppy disk drive in 1987; together they sold over 5 million units worldwide (not counting clones). The Spectrum was among the first mainstream-audience home computers in the UK, similar in significance to the Commodore 64 in the US. The introduction of the ZX Spectrum led to a boom in companies producing software and hardware for the machine, the effects of which are still seen.
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Although dedicated composite or "green screen" computer displays were available for this market segment and offered a sharper display, a monitor was often a later purchase made only after users had bought a floppy disk drive, printer, modem, and the other pieces of a full system. The reason for this was that while those TV-monitors had difficulty displaying the clear and readable 80-column text that became the industry standard at the time, the only consumers who really needed that were the power users utilizing the machine for business purposes, while the average casual consumer would use the system for games only and was content with the lower resolution for which a TV worked fine. An important exception was the Radio Shack TRS-80, the first mass-marketed computer for home use, which included its own 64-column display monitor and full-travel keyboard as standard features. This "peripherals sold separately" approach is another defining characteristic of the home computer era.
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An innovative alternative was the Exatron Stringy Floppy, a continuous loop tape drive which was much faster than a datacassette drive and could perform much like a floppy disk drive. It was available for the TRS-80 and some others. A closely related technology was the ZX Microdrive developed by Sinclair Research in the UK for their ZX Spectrum and QL home computers. Eventually mass production of 5.25" drives resulted in lower prices, and after about 1984 they pushed cassette drives out of the US home computer market. 5.25" floppy disk drives would remain standard until the end of the 8-bit era. Though external 3.5" drives were made available for home computer systems toward the latter part of the 1980s, almost all software sold for 8-bit home computers remained on 5.25" disks; 3.5" drives were used for data storage, with the exception of the Japanese MSX standard, on which 5.25" floppies were never popular.
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The PERQ 2 (codenamed Kristmas during development) was announced in 1983.PERQ History: Part V: 20. ICL Manufacturing, Chilton Computing, UK. The PERQ 2 could be distinguished from the PERQ 1 by its wider, ICL-designed cabinet, with a lighter-coloured fascia, vertical floppy disk drive and three- digit diagnostic display. The PERQ 2 used the same 16k WCS CPU as the PERQ 1A and had a 3-button mouse in place of the graphics tablet. It was configured with a quieter 8-inch 35 MB Micropolis Corporation 1201 hard disk, 1 or 2 MB of RAM and had the option of the PERQ 1's portrait monitor or a 19-inch, 1280×1024 landscape orientation monitor.PERQ History: Part VII: 34. Hardware, Chilton Computing, UK. Due to manufacturing problems with the original 3RCC PERQ 2 (also known as the K1), ICL revised the hardware design, resulting in the PERQ 2 T1 (or ICL 8222). The later PERQ 2 T2 (ICL 8223) and PERQ 2 T4 models replaced the 8-inch hard disk with a 5¼-inch hard disk, which also allowed for a second disk to be installed internally.
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Later revisions of the chipset are PAL/NTSC switchable in software. The sound chip produces four hardware-mixed channels, two to the left and two to the right, of 8-bit PCM at a sampling frequency of up to . Each hardware channel has its own independent volume level and sampling rate, and can be designated to another channel where it can modulate both volume and frequency using its own output. With DMA disabled it's possible to output with a sampling frequency up to . There's a common trick to output sound with 14-bit precision that can be combined to output 14-bit sound. The stock system comes with AmigaOS version 1.2 or 1.3 and of chip RAM (150 ns access time), one built-in double-density standard floppy disk drive that is completely programmable and can read IBM PC disks, standard Amiga disks, and up to using custom-formatting drivers. Despite the lack of Amiga 2000-compatible internal expansion slots, there are many ports and expansion options. There are two DE9M Atari joystick ports for joysticks or mice, stereo audio (RCA connectors 1 V p-p).
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Apple soon solved the supply problems, and the proceeds from PowerBook sales reached $1 billion in the first year after launch. Apple surpassed Toshiba and Compaq as the market leader in worldwide share of portable computer shipments.Carlton, p. 191 The PowerBook 100, 140, and 170 contributed greatly to Apple's financial success in 1992. At the end of the financial year, Apple announced its highest figures yet, $7.1 billion in revenues and an increase in global market share from 8% to 8.5%, the highest it had been in four years. However, the initial popularity of the PowerBook 100 did not last. Sales decreased, and by December 1991 the 140 and 170 models had become more popular because customers were willing to pay more for a built-in floppy disk drive and second serial port, which the PowerBook 100 lacked. By August 10, 1992, Apple quietly dropped the PowerBook 100 from its price list but continued to sell existing stock through its own dealers and alternative discount consumer-oriented stores such as Price Club. In these stores, a 4MB RAM/40MB hard drive configuration with a floppy drive sold for less than $1,000 (more than $1,500 less than the similar 2MB/20MB configuration's original list price).
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