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151 Sentences With "floppy disk drives"

How to use floppy disk drives in a sentence? Find typical usage patterns (collocations)/phrases/context for "floppy disk drives" and check conjugation/comparative form for "floppy disk drives". Mastering all the usages of "floppy disk drives" from sentence examples published by news publications.

The slot at the bottom was meant to house two floppy disk drives.
Behold the Floppotron, the mighty army of floppy disk drives and other ancient computer hardware used to make sweet, sweet music.
Every detail is note-perfect, from the Dave Matthews soundtrack to the floppy disk drives to the Howard Zinn-loving love interest.
And now you can go frolic in the land of dead tech with the likes of VCD players and floppy disk drives.
But due to its rarity, an original Lisa with its two double-sided 5.25-inch floppy disk drives can be quite valuable.
Zadrożniak first gained some internet street cred when he repurposed two floppy disk drives to play John Williams' "Imperial March" from Star Wars.
The Floppotron is composed of 64 floppy disk drives, eight hard disks, and two scanners, most of which appear to date from the 1980s.
The early model's incredibly steep price tag of $9,995, unreliable floppy disk drives, slow read speeds and high error rates led to poor sales.
While Zadrożniak's technology isn't novel, he has perfected his craft to produce some impressive tunes since he first began working with floppy disk drives in 2011.
Releasing on a 3.5 floppy disk that should run on any 386-era PC, the game won't work on modern PCs that lack floppy disk drives.
By repurposing 64 floppy disk drives, eight hard disks, and two scanners in his native Poland, Zadrożniak created a computer symphony that he's now using to play everyone's favorite pocket monster track.
Click here to view original GIF GIF Source: Paweł ZadrożniakFor a while now, Paweł Zadrożniak has been treating us to some classic tunes played on his Floppotron— a musical instrument built from 64 floppy disk drives Frankenstein-ed together.
Long, long ago (in 2011, to be precise), Paweł Zadrożniak, then a student at Poland's AGH University of Science and Technology, became something of an internet hero when he took two floppy disk drives and made them play John Williams' "Imperial March" from Star Wars.
Like magnetic tape drives, floppy disk drives have physical limits on the spacing of flux reversals (also called transitions, represented by one-bits).
Code running in this second bank was nicknamed "slushware", in contrast to firmware since it was loaded from floppy disk as the machine booted. It was also known as the PC278. The model could be expanded, either by adding another pair of 5.25-inch floppy disk drives, and it could also support either an additional pair of RX01 or RX02 8-inch floppy disk drives or a Winchester disk.
Half-height drive bays are high by wide, and are the standard housing for CD and DVD drives in modern computers. They were sometimes used for other things in the past, including hard disk drives (roughly between 10 and 100 MB) and floppy disk drives. As the name indicates, two half-height devices can fit in one full-height bay. Often represented as 5.25-inch, these floppy disk drives are obsolete.
Commercially, stepper motors are used in floppy disk drives, flatbed scanners, computer printers, plotters, slot machines, image scanners, compact disc drives, intelligent lighting, camera lenses, CNC machines and, more recently, in 3D printers.
The only difference between an Eagle I and an Eagle II, for instance, was the number of floppy-disk drives. By adding the right drives, and a hard disk, SASI card, and extra power supply, a I could be upgraded to a II, III, IV, or V; a III could become a IV or V; a IV could become a V. When half-height floppy-disk drives and hard disks became available, Eagle drives that had worn out could be replaced with ones that took up less space and drew less power. The Eagle BIOS supported up to two double-sided floppy-disk drives and up to four 8 MB hard-disk partitions. Systems could be built with two half-height floppies and a 10, 20, or 32 MB hard disk.
The CIS-30 was a success, and soon followed by similar devices for other platforms. Floppy disk drives followed, along with rapid growth. Percom incorporated (dropping the capital C in the name) in 1978.
In the mid-to-late 1980s the similarly sized Fujitsu Eagle, which used (coincidentally) 10.5-inch platters, was a popular product. With increasing sales of microcomputers having built in floppy-disk drives (FDDs), HDDs that would fit to the FDD mountings became desirable. Starting with the Shugart Associates SA1000 HDD Form factors, initially followed those of 8-inch, 5½-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disk drives. Although referred to by these nominal sizes, the actual sizes for those three drives respectively are 9.5″, 5.75″ and 4″ wide.
This was introduced in 1984. It had a smaller system case, color monitor, 8 MHz clock, two 5.25-inch RX50 floppy disk drives, 32 KB user RAM, 32 KB system RAM. It was also known as the PC238.
8.0″ drive bays were found in early IBM computers, CP/M computers, and the TRS-80 Model II. They were high, wide, and approximately deep, and were used for hard disk drives and floppy disk drives. This form factor is obsolete.
The Wave Mate Bullet runs CP/M 3.0 and CP/M 2.2 is available. It is available in many configurations but typically is found in a small chassis with two 96 tracks per inch 5.25" floppy disk drives. The 5.25" disks were formatted on both sides with five 1024 byte sectors per track with 80 tracks per side for a total of 800K per disk. The standard configurations includes two serial ports, a parallel port, a general purpose external DMA bus (GPED), separate connectors for 5.25" and 8" floppy disk drives, and a hard disk interface.
There is a floppy drive port for daisy-chaining up to three extra floppy disk drives via a DB23F connector. 070728 amigahardware.mariomisic.de The then-standard RS-232 serial port (DB25M) and Centronics parallel port (DB25F) are also included. The power supply is (, ).
The machine did gain popularity in The Netherlands, especially in the areas of science, education, and data communications (videotex). The P2000M incorporated two 5,25-inch floppy disk drives beside a built-in monochrome screen. It could run CP/M or Microsoft BASIC applications, depending on the cartridge used.
DolphinDOS is a hardware expansion for the Commodore computers and floppy disk drives like Commodore 1541, 1541-II, Commodore 1571. It combined the disk controller side RAM expansion and firmware replacement with computer side KERNAL replacement and additional Parallel connection between the disk drive controller and the computer.
The Macintosh External Disk Drive is the original of a series of external -inch floppy disk drives manufactured and sold by Apple Computer exclusively for the Macintosh series of computers introduced in January 1984. Later, Apple would unify their external drives to work cross-platform between the Macintosh and Apple II product lines, dropping the name "Macintosh" from the drives. Though Apple had been producing external floppy disk drives prior to 1984, they were exclusively developed for the Apple II, III and Lisa computers using the industry standard -inch flexible disk format. The Macintosh external drives were the first to widely introduce Sony's new -inch rigid disk standard commercially and throughout their product line.
Olivetti M20 motherboard Zilog 8001 on the motherboard of an Olivetti M20 computer M20 uses Zilog Z8001 4 MHz CPU and 128 KB RAM, which can be expanded up to 512 KB by three 128 KB memory boards. Keyboard, motherboard and disk drives are contained in all-in-one unit with separate monitor. The computer has also parallel (IEEE-488) and serial port (RS-232-C). Standard configuration includes two 5-inch 320 KB floppy disk drives (286 KB formatted capacity). Optional were 160 KB or 640 KB (compatible with 320 KB disks) drives or 5-inch hard disk in place of one of the floppy disk drives (9.2 MB formatted capacity).
Few products in history have enjoyed such spectacular declines in cost and physical size along with equally dramatic improvements in capacity and performance. IBM manufactured 8-inch floppy disk drives from 1969 until the mid-1980s, but did not become a significant manufacturer of smaller-sized, 5.25- or 3.5-inch floppy disk drives (the dimension refers to the diameter of the floppy disk, not the size of the drive).1986 Disk/Trend Report – Flexible Disk Drives shows IBM production only of 8-inch FDDs and states, IBM will end internal production of 8-inch drives by 1987. IBM always offered its magnetic disk drives for sale but did not offer them with original equipment manufacturer (OEM) terms until 1981.
The larger models 20 and 40 had floppy disk drives. The floor-standing models 50, 150, and 250 had hard disks, from which diskless models booted. In early models, these were 8" floppy disks, and later 5¼" disks. The diskless model, that partnered the DRS 20, was the DRS 10\.
While floppy disk drives still have some limited uses, especially with legacy industrial computer equipment, they have been superseded by data storage methods with much greater data storage capacity and data transfer speed, such as USB flash drives, memory cards, optical discs, and storage available through local computer networks and cloud storage.
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.
Floppy distributions of OS/2 3.0, PC DOS 7 and onward used XDF formatting for most of the media set. Floppy disks formatted using XDF can only be read in floppy disk drives that are attached directly to the system by way of a FDC. Thus, USB attached floppy drives cannot read XDF formatted media.
The DOS itself is based on the Commodore PET IEEE 8250 drive DOS. Since it can only deal with two floppy disk drives, including the internal, only one external drive may be connected to the internal floppy disk controller. Like earlier systems, up to 4 drives can be daisy-chained on the IEC port.
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.
Rob Northen Copylock (also known simply as Copylock) is a copy-protection system designed to prevent disk duplication with standard floppy disk drives on the Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS platforms. It was created by British programmer Rob Northen after founding his own company Copylock Software. It was used mainly to prevent games from being copied by regular users.
The only floppy disk drives that were readily available in 1975 were IBM compatible 8-inch drives. MITS selected the Pertec FD400 disk drive which could store over 300,000 bytes of data. The Altair disk controller occupied two boards and had over 60 ICs. The initial units were to be available in August, but were delayed until the end of 1975.
Hard disk drives, floppy disk drives and optical disc drives serve as both input and output devices. Computer networking is another form of I/O. I/O devices are often complex computers in their own right, with their own CPU and memory. A graphics processing unit might contain fifty or more tiny computers that perform the calculations necessary to display 3D graphics.
The development of thin plasma display and LCD screens permitted a somewhat smaller form factor, called the "lunchbox" computer. The screen formed one side of the enclosure, with a detachable keyboard and one or two half-height floppy disk drives, mounted facing the ends of the computer. Some variations included a battery, allowing operation away from AC outlets.Scott Mueller, Upgrading and Repairing Laptops, Que Publishing, 2004, , pp.
Defragmentation is advantageous and relevant to file systems on electromechanical disk drives (hard disk drives, floppy disk drives and optical disk media). The movement of the hard drive's read/write heads over different areas of the disk when accessing fragmented files is slower, compared to accessing the entire contents of a non-fragmented file sequentially without moving the read/write heads to seek other fragments.
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.
In the United States disk drives quickly became standard, despite the 1541 costing roughly five times as much as a Datasette. In most parts of Europe, the Datasette was the medium of choice for several years after its launch, although floppy disk drives were generally available. The inexpensive and widely available audio cassettes made the Datasette a good choice for the budget-aware home computer mass market.
The MSD Super Disk were a series of 5¼-inch floppy disk drives compatible to some degree with the Commodore 1541 disk drive. produced by Micro Systems Development (Dallas, Texas; later MSD Systems) for use with Commodore 8-bit home computers. Two different versions of the MSD Super Disk were available: the single-drive model, SD-1; and the dual-drive model, SD-2.
The R2C was the color version of the 2nd Z80-based microcomputer produced by Regency Systems of Champaign, Illinois, the first being the RC1. The RC1 had a high resolution display and dual 8-inch floppy disk drives. It was essentially a standalone PLATO environment, adapting the TUTOR language and environment. The company was founded by David Eades, a real-estate agency owner, and Paul Tenczar, creator of the TUTOR language.
Shugart joined Memorex in 1969 as Vice President of its Equipment Division and led the development of its 3660 (compatible with IBM 2314) and 3670 (compatible with IBM 3330) disk storage subsystems. His team also developed the Memorex 650, one of the first commercially available floppy disk drives. He founded Shugart Associates in February 1973 and resigned as CEO in October 1974. The company was later acquired by Xerox.
The 380Z was packaged in a large, black, 19-inch rack-mount, rectangular metal case containing the power supply, a number of printed circuit boards and the optional 5¼-inch floppy disk drives. The front panel had a pair of strong carrying handles, a keyswitch and a reset button. The keyswitch controlled power and also enabled the reset button. The keyboard was separate and came in a tough metal case.
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.
1984: Apple Macintosh. In 1983 Apple Computer introduced the first mass-marketed microcomputer with a graphical user interface, the Lisa. The Lisa ran on a Motorola 68000 microprocessor and came equipped with 1 megabyte of RAM, a black-and-white monitor, dual 5¼-inch floppy disk drives and a 5 megabyte Profile hard drive. The Lisa's slow operating speed and high price (US$10,000), however, led to its commercial failure.
Since MSX BASIC was meant to be expandable from inception, it was possible to write add-on modules quite easily. Support for specific hardware was commonly added by means of expansion cartridges, which also served as the interface to the hardware in question. MSX Disk-BASIC is an example, bundled in the cartridge that provides the hardware interface to the disk drives, it adds commands to access the floppy disk drives.
The original Apple III has a built-in real-time clock, which is recognized by Apple SOS. The clock was later removed from the "revised" model, and was instead made available as an add-on. Along with the built-in floppy drive, the Apple III can also handle up to three additional external Disk III floppy disk drives. The Disk III is only officially compatible with the Apple III.
Internally, both models feature TEC brand (model FB-501) floppy drive mechanisms. The electronics on the mechanisms are modified by MSD to be compatible with the GCR recording format used by all Commodore floppy disk drives at that time (the D9060/90 hard disks and the later produced 1581 3½-inch drive used the MFM recording format). The main control board utilizes a 1 MHz Rockwell International 6511Q microcontroller.
The Datamaster is an all-in-one computer with text-mode CRT display, keyboard, processor, memory, and two 8-inch floppy disk drives in one cabinet. The processor is an 8-bit Intel 8085, with bank switching to manage 256 kB of memory. The intention of the Datamaster was to provide a computer that could be installed and operated without specialists. A BASIC interpreter was built-in to the system.
Copy System CS3, shown with six drives. When ALF began selling music cards for the Apple II, floppy disk drives were not yet common on the Apple, so the software was supplied on cassette tape.Apple II History, Section 5, The Disk II. Retrieved 2013-04-11. ALF worked closely with a local cassette tape duplication company, helping them modify equipment designed for voice and music to copy cassettes with data in Apple's format.
Mass storage was either via cassette tape or floppy disk (which required a disk controller card). The cassette interface operated at either 300 bit/s (CUTS standard) or 1200 bit/s. COS 4.0 and later systems were not fitted with the cassette interface. Early systems could be fitted with an optional single density floppy disk controller card that could interfaced to either internal 5¼-inch or external 8-inch floppy disk drives.
The Acorn System 4 was similar to the System 3, but in a double height frame, containing fourteen slots in the lower frame, and two floppy disk drives in the upper half of the frame above them. With casing, power supply, and a basic 16K of RAM it was being offered for £1525 in 1982 (again, plus extra for the keyboard).Acorn System 4, Chris's AcornsControl Universal Ltd catalogue, section 4, page 4.4, 1982.
The floppy disk drives, known as the RX50, accepted proprietary In the context of floppy disks, 1 KB = 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes. single-sided, quad-density 5¼-inch diskettes. Initial versions of the operating systems on the Rainbow did not allow for low-level formatting, requiring users to purchase RX50 media from Digital Equipment Corporation. The high cost of media ($5 per disk) led to accusations of vendor "lock-in" against Digital.
The IBM 5110 Computing System is the successor of the IBM 5100 Portable Computer. The IBM 5110 was announced in January 1978 (a little over 2 years after the introduction of the IBM 5100). Its main differences were support for more I/O devices (floppy disk drives, IEEE-488, RS232, ...) and a character set (EBCDIC) which was compatible with other IBM machines. These improvements made it partially incompatible with the IBM 5100.
The Vector Graphic 3 had a fixed keyboard housed anchoring a combined screen terminal and CPU case. The Vector Graphic 4 was a transitional 8-bit and 16-bit hybrid model. Although primarily used with the CP/M operating system, the Vector 3 ran several others including OASIS, Micropolis Disk Operating System (MDOS), and Micropolis Z80 Operating System (MZOS). Early Vector Graphic models used the Micropolis floppy disk controller and Micropolis floppy disk drives.
Because there were no smaller floppy disk drives, smaller HDD form factors developed from product offerings or industry standards. 2½-inch drives are actually 2.75″ wide. , 2½-inch and 3½-inch hard disks are the most popular sizes. By 2009, all manufacturers had discontinued the development of new products for the 1.3-inch, 1-inch and 0.85-inch form factors due to falling prices of flash memory, which has no moving parts.
The Visual 1050 was an 8-bit desktop computer sold by Visual Technology in the early 1980s. The computer ran under the CP/M operating system and used 2 400KB, 5¼, SSDD, 96tpi floppy disk drives (TEAC FD-55E) for mass storage with an optional 10Mb external Winchester hard disk drive. In addition to the Zilog Z80 processor clocked at 4 MHz, the Visual 1050 also included a MOS Technology 6502 used as a graphics coprocessor.InfoWorld, July 18, 1983.
Parallel ATA (PATA), originally ', is an interface standard for the connection of storage devices such as hard disk drives, floppy disk drives, and optical disc drives in computers. The standard is maintained by the X3/INCITS committee.t13.org It uses the underlying ' (ATA) and Packet Interface (ATAPI) standards. The Parallel ATA standard is the result of a long history of incremental technical development, which began with the original AT Attachment interface, developed for use in early PC AT equipment.
Wire is versatile in its nature. Thus a paper clip is a useful accessory in many kinds of mechanical work including computer work: the metal wire can be unfolded with a little force. Several devices call for a very thin rod to push a recessed button which the user might only rarely need. This is seen on most CD-ROM drives as an "emergency eject" should the power fail; also on early floppy disk drives (including the early Macintosh).
To conserve disk space, two 12-bit FAT entries used three consecutive 8-bit bytes on disk, requiring manipulation to unpack the 12-bit values. This was sufficient for the original floppy disk drives, and small hard disk up to 32 megabytes. The FAT16B version available with DOS 3.31, supported 32-bit sector numbers and so increased the volume size limit. All the control structures fit inside the first track, to avoid head movement during read and write operations.
The Super sport series was originally launched with an Intel 8086 processor, dual floppy disk drives, a backlight backlit, blue and white STN LCD screen, and a NiCd battery pack. Later models featured a 16-bit Intel 80286 processor and a 20 MB hard disk drive. On the strength of this deal, ZDS became the world's largest laptop supplier in 1987 and 1988. ZDS partnered with Tottori Sanyo in the design and manufacturing of these laptops.
A direct descendant of OS/A+, DOS XL provided additional features to Atari's equipped with floppy disk drives. These included single and double density support, a command-line mode (called the command processor or CP), a menu mode (an executable loaded in memory), batch file support, and support for XL extended memory and OSS SuperCartridge banked memory. Later versions included Axlon RamDisk support, Mosaic RamDisk support, BIT-3 support and BUG/65. In addition to supporting auto-booting `AUTORUN.
The Commodore 8060, 8061, and 8062 are a series of 8" floppy disk drives developed by Commodore Business Machines. These disk drives use the parallel interface IEEE-488 to connect with Commodore's PET and CBM-II line of microcomputers. The 8060 is a single-disk model, while the 8061 and 8062 are both double-drive models similar to the later Commodore 8280 8" drive. The drives in the 806x series are full-height Shugart SA-800s.
Most Australian units were shipped with 720 KB floppy disk drives (80 track, double density), although specifications imply the drives were only 360 KB"APC-III System Reference Guide, Section 1 (Hardware Overview)", NEC Information Systems March 1985 (40 track, DD). 360 KB disks were readable and writeable by 'double-stepping' the 720 KB drives. Users could also purchase a hard disk expansion option. This was initially limited to the 10 MB ST-506 hard disks.
The basic SAM Coupé model has 256 KiB of RAM, internally upgradable to 512 KiB via a connector on the main board accessible via a trapdoor underneath, and externally up to an additional 4 MiB, added in 1 MiB packs via the "Euroconnector" on the back of the system. The computer has a direct connection for a cassette recorder for data storage but two 3.5 inch floppy disk drives can be installed within the case as well or externally using an interface.
Closeup of a running 5120 The IBM 5120 Computing System (sometimes referred to as the IBM 5110 Model 3) was announced in February 1980 as the desktop follow- on to the IBM 5110 Computing System. It featured two built-in 8-inch 1.2 MB floppy disk drives, 9-inch monochrome monitor, 32K RAM and optional IBM 5114 stand-alone diskette unit with two additional 8-inch 1.2 MB floppy disk drives.IBM 5120 Computing System IBM Archives. Retrieved 10-19-2011.
In 1987, HP released a portable version of their 16-bit Vectra CS computer. It had the classic laptop configuration (keyboard and monitor closes up clam-shell style in order to carry), however, it was very heavy and fairly large. It had a full-size keyboard (with separate numeric keypad) and a large amber LCD screen. While it was offered with dual 3.5-inch floppy disk drives, the most common configuration was a 20 MB hard drive and a single floppy drive.
The monitor could also display graphics well enough for the bundled graphics program and for some games. 3-inch drive common on Amstrad machines The floppy disk drives on these models were in the unusual 3-inch "compact floppy" format, which was selected as it had a simpler electrical interface than 3½-inch drives. In the range's early days supplies of 3-inch floppies occasionally ran out, but by 1988 the PCW's popularity encouraged suppliers to compete for this market.
The brand has been used for flash memory products, Blu-ray players and burners, DVD-ROM burners, CD-ROM burners, DVD and CD media, network hard disks, portable hard disks, digital video recorders, and floppy disk drives. The brand Plextor was in 2010 licensed to Philips & Lite- On Digital Solutions Corporation, a subsidiary company of Lite-On Technology Corporation. Therefore, all the Plextor products since then, especially SSDs, are of a Taiwanese, not a Japanese brand. However, the Japanese company Plextor Inc.
In disk storage and drum memory, interleaving is a technique used to improve access performance of storage by putting data accessed sequentially into non- sequential sectors. The number of physical sectors between consecutive logical sectors is called the interleave skip factor or skip factor. Low-level format utility performing interleave speed tests on a 10-megabyte IBM PC XT hard drive. Historically, interleaving was used in ordering block storage on storage devices such as drums, floppy disk drives and hard disk drives.
Floppy disks themselves are fragile, or may need to be replaced often. An alternative is to use a floppy disk hardware emulator, a device which appears to be a standard floppy drive to the old equipment by interfacing directly to the floppy disk controller, while storing data in another medium such as a USB thumb drive, Secure Digital card, or a shared drive on a computer network. Emulators can also be used as a higher- performance replacement for mechanical floppy disk drives.
SIO was developed in order to allow expansion without using internal card slots as in the Apple II, due to problems with the FCC over radio interference. This required it to be fairly flexible in terms of device support. Devices that used the SIO interface included printers, floppy disk drives, cassette decks, modems and expansion boxes. Some devices had ROM based drivers that were copied to the host computer when booted allowing new devices to be supported without native support built into the computer itself.
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.
The design of the SuperDisk system came from an early 1990s project at Iomega. It is one of the last examples of floptical technology, where lasers are used to guide a magnetic head which is much smaller than those used in traditional floppy disk drives. Iomega orphaned the project around the time they decided to release the Zip drive in 1994. The idea eventually ended up at 3M, where the concept was refined and the design was licensed to established floppy drive makers Matsushita and Mitsubishi.
A 5.25-inch DVD drive Full-height bays were found in old PCs in the early to mid-1980s. They were high, wide, and up to deep, used mainly for hard disk drives and floppy disk drives. This is the size of the internal (screwed) part of the bay, as the front side is actually . The difference between those widths and the name of the bay size is because it is named after the size of floppy that would fit in those drives, a 5.25″-wide square.
The CS had TTL metering and the Memotron had auto exposure with a handy system which allowed the user to take and retain a meter reading and save the exposure for a shot taken where the subject matter had been reframed. Very handy for against the light shots etc. Chinon also was a manufacturer of CD-ROM drives, scanners, electronic pocket calculators, and floppy disk drives. They even dabbled in VR with Cybershades for the PC, launched in the US market in 1995 for $199.
DEC VT180 The VT180 is a personal computer produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts. Introduced in early 1982, the CP/M-based VT180 was DEC's entry-level microcomputer. "VT180" is the unofficial name for the combination of the VT100 computer terminal and VT18X option. The VT18X includes a 2 MHz Zilog Z80 microprocessor and 64K RAM on two circuit boards that fit inside the terminal, and two external 5.25-inch floppy disk drives with room for two more in an external enclosure.
Among the kits sold there were also alternative floppy disk drives for TRS-80 computers. But these needed the infamous TRS-80 expansion interface, which was very expensive, and had a very unreliable floppy disk controller because it used the WD1771 floppy disc controller chip without an external "data separator". To fix this problem MCP developed a small plugin board which could be plugged into the socket for the WD1771, and which contained a data separator, and a socket for the WD1791 to support dual- density operation.
Philips NMS-8255 (two drives) MSX 2 homecomputer NMS-8255 seen from the back The Philips NMS-8250, (NMS is short for "New Media Systems") was a professional MSX 2 home computer for the high end market, with two built in floppy disk drives in a "pizza box" configuration. The machine was in fact manufactured by Sanyo and it is basically the MPC-25FS with a different color. It featured professional video output possibilities, such as SCART for a better picture quality, and a detachable keyboard.
The installation of floppy disk drives also requires the computer's power supply to be upgraded. There is no internal cooling fan in the Model III; it uses passive convection cooling (unless an unusual number of power-hungry expansions were installed internally, such as a hard disk drive, graphics board, speedup kit, RS-232 board, etc.). Tandy claimed that the Model III was compatible with 80% of Model I software. Many software publishers issued patches to permit their Model I programs to run on the Model III.
Some models also had computer-like features such as floppy disk drives and the ability to output to an external printer. They also got a name change, now being called "electronic typewriters" and typically occupying a lower end of the market, selling for under $200 USD. During the late 1980s and into the 1990s the predominant word processing program was WordPerfect. It had more than 50% of the worldwide market as late as 1995, but by 2000 Microsoft Word had up to 95% market share.
Size comparison of a flash drive and a 3.5-inch floppy disk. The flash drive can hold about 11,380 times more data. Floppy disk drives are rarely fitted to modern computers and are obsolete for normal purposes, although internal and external drives can be fitted if required. Floppy disks may be the method of choice for transferring data to and from very old computers without USB or booting from floppy disks, and so they are sometimes used to change the firmware on, for example, BIOS chips.
The fanless power supply unit, located under the motherboard, often caused trouble. The choice of peripheral I/O devices made the use of interrupts virtually impossible. The Bondwell-12 was a "luggable" portable computer with a built-in 9 inch (23 cm) monochrome CRT display, equipped with 64 kiB of internal memory, CP/M 2.2 and two single- sided, double density, 5.25 inch floppy disk drives (180 kiB). The Bondwell-14 had 128 kiB of memory, CP/M 3.0 and two double-sided drives (360 kiB).
Until about 2005, most desktop and laptop computers were supplied with floppy disk drives in addition to USB ports, but floppy disk drives became obsolete after widespread adoption of USB ports and the larger USB drive capacity compared to the "1.44 megabyte" (1440 kibibyte) 3.5-inch floppy disk. USB flash drives use the USB mass storage device class standard, supported natively by modern operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and other Unix-like systems, as well as many BIOS boot ROMs. USB drives with USB 2.0 support can store more data and transfer faster than much larger optical disc drives like CD-RW or DVD-RW drives and can be read by many other systems such as the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, DVD players, automobile entertainment systems, and in a number of handheld devices such as smartphones and tablet computers, though the electronically similar SD card is better suited for those devices. A flash drive consists of a small printed circuit board carrying the circuit elements and a USB connector, insulated electrically and protected inside a plastic, metal, or rubberized case, which can be carried in a pocket or on a key chain, for example.
This allowed the program to remain compatible with third-party floppy disk drives for the C64, such as the Indus GT and MSD Super Disk, unlike many copy protected packages. Commodore serial printers were supported, as were RS-232 and Centronics printers with the appropriate interface. The spreadsheet had a maximum size of 1000 rows by 64 columns, or 64,000 cells, but because only about 10k of memory was left available after the program was loaded, not all the cells could be used. The additional cells provided flexibility in the dimensions of the spreadsheet.
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.
The Horizon was an 8-bit ZiLOG Z80A-based computer, typically with 16K to 64K of RAM. It had one or two single-sided single or double density hard sectored floppy disk drives (externally expandable to 3 or 4), and serial interfaces connected it to a computer terminal and a printer. It ran CP/M or North Star's own proprietary NSDOS. It also included many chips on the motherboard that would otherwise require separate S-100 cards in other systems, thereby allowing the machine to operate "out of the box" with minimal setup.
Floppy disk drives were initially very costly compared to the system purchase price. Plug- in ROM cartridges containing game or application software were popular in earlier home computers since they were easier to use, faster, and more reliable than cassette tapes. Once diskette drives became available at low cost, cartridges declined in popularity since they were more expensive to manufacture than reproducing a diskette, and had comparatively small capacity compared to diskettes. A few cartridges contained battery-backed memory that allowed users to save data (for example, game high scores) between uses of the cartridge.
The basic parts of the Twin Famicom include a 60-pin slot for Famicom cartridges, a slot for Disk System's Disk Cards, a switch located right below the cartridge slot which allows the player to choose between "" or "", the power button, reset button, and the eject buttons. FDS disks can be removed using the yellow button below the disk slot. The mechanism that it uses is similar to ones that are used in contemporary floppy disk drives. The eject button for cartridges is located between the power and reset buttons.
CBM Model 4016 CBM Model 4032 CBM 4040 dual disk drive (5.25-inch) CBM 8296-D with two floppy disk drives In 1980, the 4000-series PETs were launched. These included the enhanced BASIC 4.0, which added commands for disk functions and significantly improved garbage cleanup. By this point, Commodore discovered that people were buying cheaper and models of the 3000-series and upgrading the RAM rather than paying extra for the model. Because of this, they punched out the memory sockets in the 4016 (there was no 4000-series PET) to prevent that practice.
TRS-80 Model 4P The Model 4P (September 1983, Radio Shack catalog number 26-1080), is a self-contained luggable unit. It has all the features of the desktop Model 4 except for the ability to add two outboard floppy disk drives and the interface for cassette tape storage (audio sent to the cassette port in Model III mode goes to the internal speaker). It was sold with the two internal single-sided 180KB drives. It was later made with the Gate Array technology (catalog number 26-1080A).
The machine was physically large, with an option for one or two built-in three-inch floppy disk drives manufactured by Hitachi. At the time, most home computers used ordinary tape recorders for storage. Another unusual feature of the Einstein was that on start-up the computer entered a simple machine code monitor, called MOS (Machine Operating System). A variety of software could then be loaded from disk, including a CP/M-compatible operating system called Xtal DOS (pronounced 'Crystal DOS', created by Crystal Computers in Torquay), and a BASIC interpreter (Xtal BASIC).
As operating systems one could choose between Concurrent CP/M-86 with GSX graphic extension, MP/M-86, MS-DOS, CP/M (for the Z80 board) and Unix. It could support up to four 320 KB 5.25-inch floppy disk drives, and a hard disk of up to 20 MB. It had advanced color graphics with 640x200 resolution with 8 colors per pixel, based on a Motorola 6845 video chip, and used an RGB color video monitor. Up to 1152 KB of memory could be supported. The Fujitsu Micro 16s series was discontinued in 1986.
In all models, including the last, the monitor's casing included the CPU, RAM, floppy disk drives and power supply for all of the systems' components. All except the last included a printer in the price. Early models used 3-inch floppy disks, while those sold from 1991 onwards used 3½-inch floppies, which became the industry standard around the time the PCW series was launched. A variety of inexpensive products and services were launched to copy 3-inch floppies to the 3½-inch format so that data could be transferred to other machines.
The CMD FD series was Creative Micro Designs (CMD)'s range of third-party floppy disk drives for the Commodore 8-bit line of home computers. Using 3½" floppy disks, they provided a significantly larger storage capacity than Commodore-produced drives; the FD-2000 offered 1600 kB of storage using standard double-sided, high-density floppies, while the FD-4000 also allowed the use of 3200 kB extra-high density (ED) floppies. In contrast, the Commodore 1581 3½" drive only supported 800 kB double-sided, double-density disks.
Older models of computers, electronic keyboards and industrial automation often used floppy disk drives for data transfer. Older equipment may be difficult to replace or upgrade because of cost, requirement for continuous availability or unavailable upgrades. Proper operation may require operating system, software and data to be read and written from and to floppies, forcing users to maintain floppy drives on supporting systems. Floppy disks and floppy drives are gradually going out of production, and replacement of malfunctioning drives, and the systems hosting them, is becoming increasingly difficult.
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.
Early copy protection schemes deliberately introduced read errors on the disk, the software refusing to load unless the correct error message is returned. The general idea was that simple disk-copy programs are incapable of copying the errors. When one of these errors is encountered, the disk drive (as do many floppy disk drives) will attempt one or more reread attempts after first resetting the head to track zero. Few of these schemes had much deterrent effect, as various software companies soon released "nibbler" utilities that enabled protected disks to be copied and, in some cases, the protection removed.
It ran on the Motorola 68000 CPU and used both dual floppy disk drives and a 5 MB hard drive for storage. The machine also had 1MB of RAM used for running software from disk without rereading the disk persistently. After the failure of the Lisa in terms of sales, Apple released its first Macintosh computer, still running on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, but with only 128KB of RAM, one floppy drive, and no hard drive in order to lower the price. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we see more advancements with computers becoming more useful for actual computational purposes.
They had agreements with Peachtree software to sell a customized "turn-key" version of their accounting, CPA and real estate management software. Shortly after the release of the Z-90, they released a 5MB hard disk unit and double density external floppy disk drives. While the H11 was popular with hard-core hobbyists, Heath engineers realized that DEC's low-end PDP microprocessors would not be able to get Heath up the road to more powerful systems at an affordable price. Heath/Zenith then designed a dual Intel 8085/8088-based system dubbed the H100 (or Z-100, in preassembled form, sold by ZDS).
The Compaq LTE was a line of laptop computers made by Compaq, introduced in 1989.Compaq LTE Original Spec. The first models, the Compaq LTE and the Compaq LTE 286, were among the first computers to be close to the size of a paper notebook, spurring the use of the term "notebook" to describe a smaller laptop and earned a notable place in laptop history. They were also among the first to include both built-in hard disk and floppy disk drives, and later models offered optional docking stations providing performance comparable to then- current desktop machines.
In the early 1960s, as disk drives became larger and more affordable, various mainframe and minicomputer vendors began introducing disk operating systems and modifying existing operating systems to exploit disks. Both hard disks and floppy disk drives require software to manage rapid access to block storage of sequential and other data. For most microcomputers, a disk drive of any kind was an optional peripheral; systems could be used with a tape drive or booted without a storage device at all. The disk operating system component of the operating system was only needed when a disk drive was used.
Extension modules could also add new instructions to the machine. The standard set of mathematical functions of the 41-series was somewhat limited when compared to the functionality of some contemporary HP calculators (notably the HP-34C and the HP-15C). Among others, the standard function set offered no integration or root-finding capabilities and lacked support for matrices and complex numbers; these extra functions could be added by an extension module. Another module, known as the Interface Loop allowed for connection of more peripherals: larger printers, microcassette tape recorders, 3½-inch floppy disk drives, RS-232 communication interfaces, video display interfaces, etc.
ARexx is written in 68000 Assembly, and cannot therefore function at full speed with new PPC CPUs, a version of ARexx has not been rewritten for them and is still missing from MorphOS 3.0. William Hawes is no longer involved in development of Amiga programs and no other Amiga-related firm is financing new versions of ARexx. Notwithstanding this fact, the existing version of ARexx continues to be used, although it is not distributed with MorphOS. From the ARexx manual: > ARexx was developed on an Amiga 1000 computer with 512k bytes of > memory and two floppy disk drives.
Magnetic tape is commonly housed in a casing known as a cassette or cartridge—for example, the 4-track cartridge and the Compact Cassette. The cassette contains magnetic tape to provide different audio content using the same player. The outer shell, made of plastic, sometimes with metal plates and parts, permits ease of handling of the fragile tape, making it far more convenient and robust than having spools of exposed tape. Simple analog cassette audio tape recorders were commonly used for data storage and distribution on home computers at a time when floppy disk drives were very expensive.
A Tandy 1000 SX with an IBM Monitor, running Maniac Mansion The Tandy 1000 SX used a 7.16 MHz 8088-2 processor, had 384k of memory (upgradeable to 640 KB on the motherboard), came with either one or two 5.25" internal floppy disk drives, and had the light pen port (not a serial port) like the original Tandy 1000. An adjustable potentiometer inside the system controlled the volume of the internal speaker. The Tandy AX was an SX rebadged for sale in Walmart stores. The 1000 SX came with MS-DOS 3.2 and Deskmate II on 5.25" 360kB diskettes.
The Portable was basically a PC/XT motherboard, transplanted into a Compaq-style luggable case. The system featured 256 kilobytes of memory (expandable to 512 KB on the motherboard), an added CGA card connected to an internal monochrome amber composite monitor, and one or two half-height -inch 360 KB floppy disk drives, manufactured by Qume. Unlike the Compaq Portable, which used a dual-mode monitor and special display card, IBM used a stock CGA card and a 9-inch amber monochrome composite monitor, which had lower resolution. It could, however, display color if connected to an external monitor or television.
CURSOR: Programs for PET Computers was an early computer-based "magazine" that was distributed on cassette from 1978 and into the early 1980s. Each issue, consisting of the cassette itself and a short newsletter including a table of contents, contained programs, utilities, and games. Produced for users of the Commodore PET, and available by subscription only, CURSOR was a forerunner of the later disk magazines ("diskmags") that came about as floppy disk drives became common, and eventually ubiquitous, in home and personal computing during the 1980s. Ron Jeffries and Glen Fisher, of the software company The Code Works of Goleta, California, was CURSOR's publisher and editor, respectively.
The "Sideways" address space on the Acorn BBC Microcomputer, Electron and Master-series microcomputer was Acorn's bank switching implementation, providing for permanent system expansion in the days before hard disk drives or even floppy disk drives were commonplace. Filing systems, application and utility software, and drivers were made available as Sideways ROMs, and extra RAM could be fitted via the Sideways address space. The Advanced User Guide to the BBC Micro only refers to the Sideways address space as "Paged ROMs" because it predated the use of this address space for RAM expansion. The BBC B+, B+ 128 and BBC Master all featured Sideways RAM as standard.
It exists only on the stack, where BRK and PHP always write a 1, while IRQ and NMI always write a 0. The "SO" input pin, when asserted, will set the processor's overflow status bit (deasserting it does not clear the overflow bit, however). This can be used by a high-speed polling device driver, which can poll the hardware once in only three cycles by using a Branch-on-oVerflow-Clear (`BVC`) instruction that branches to itself. For example, the Commodore 1541 and other Commodore floppy disk drives use this technique to detect without delay whether the serializer is ready to accept or provide another byte of disk data.
An extensive line of upgrades and add-on hardware peripherals for the TRS-80 was developed and marketed by Tandy/RadioShack. The basic system can be expanded with up to 48 KB of RAM (in 16 KB increments), and up to four floppy disk drives and/or hard disk drives. Tandy/RadioShack provided full-service support including upgrade, repair, and training services in their thousands of stores worldwide. By 1979, the TRS-80 had the largest selection of software in the microcomputer market. Until 1982, the TRS-80 was the best-selling PC line, outselling the Apple II series by a factor of five according to one analysis.
Standardization of disk formats was not common; sometimes even different models from the same manufacturer used different disk formats. Almost universally the floppy disk drives available for 8-bit home computers were housed in external cases with their own controller boards and power supplies contained within. Only the later, advanced 8-bit home computers housed their drives within the main unit; these included the TRS-80 Model III, TRS-80 Model 4, Apple IIc, MSX2, and Commodore 128D. The later 16-bit machines such as the Atari 1040ST (not the 520ST), the Commodore Amigas, and the Tandy 1000s did house floppy drive(s) internally.
As part of a three-pronged strategy against IBM, the company released this model at the same time as the PDP-11-based PRO-380 and the Intel 8088-based Rainbow 100. The DECmate II resembles the Rainbow 100 but uses the 6120 processor. Its two operating systems are the WPS-8 word processing system, and the COS-310 Commercial Operating System running DIBOL. Like the others it had a monochrome VR201 (VT220-style) monitor, an LK201 keyboard and dual 400K single-sided quad- density 5.25-inch RX50 floppy disk drives. It had 32 Kwords of RAM for use by programs, and a further 32 Kwords containing code which was used for device emulation.
On 20 June 2005, The Register quoted Osborne's memoirs and interviewed Osborne repairman Charles Eicher to tell a tale of corporate decisions that led to the company's demise. Apparently, while sales of the new model were relatively slow, they were starting to show a profit when a vice president discovered that there was an inventory of fully equipped motherboards for the older models worth $150,000. Rather than discard the motherboards, the vice president sold Osborne leadership on the idea of building them into complete units and selling them. Soon, $2 million was spent to turn the motherboards into completed units, and for CRTs, RAM, floppy disk drives, to restore production and fabricate the molded cases.
Zero seek is a mechanical engineering design component of most computer- controlled data storage devices, including floppy disk drives, tape drives, and early hard drives. Most early data storage devices were controlled primarily by stepper motors, which are able to move in very small, precise rotational movements. These movements were commonly used to define separate physical spaces where data is to be stored, such as the rotations being used to move a read/write head across the surface of a recording media to define tracks of cylinders of data on the media. Although the movement of the stepper is precise, when a device is first powered on, the computer usually cannot immediately determine where the stepper is positioned.
Although competitors' systems generally had more sophisticated features, including colour monitors, Whitehead thought the Amstrad PCW offered the best value for money. In the US the PCW was launched at a price of $799, and its competitors were initially the Magnavox Videowriter and Smith Corona PWP, two word-processing systems whose prices also included a screen, keyboard and printer. The magazine Popular Science thought that the PCW could not compete as a general-purpose computer, because its use of non-standard 3-inch floppy disk drives and the rather old CP/M operating system would restrict the range of software available from expanding beyond the spreadsheet, typing tutor and cheque book balancing programs already on sale.
The American company's first major product, the Otrona Attaché, came out in April 1982 and folded up to the size of a fat briefcase painted off-white with orange trim. When set up for use, the carrying handle swung under the chassis to prop it up for easier viewing. A keyboard could be removed from one end, revealing a small 5 inch monochrome CRT and two 360Kb "half-height" 5.25 inch floppy disk drives. The system featured a Zilog Z80 microprocessor at running 4 MHz, used the CP/M version 2 operating system with 64K of RAM and, with installation of an 8086 microprocessor expansion card, a modified version of Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system.
Though Apple sought to force the purchase of new drives with the Apple ///, many former Apple II users quickly devised a way to adapt their existing and cheaper Disk II drives, however only one external Disk II was supported in this manner. The Disk III was the first to allow daisy chaining of up to three additional drives to the single 26-pin ribbon cable connector on the Apple ///, for a total of 4 floppy disk drives – the Apple /// was the first Apple to contain a built-in drive mechanism. The Apple III Plus changed its 26-pin connector to a DB-25 connector, which required an adapter for use with the Disk III.
Various companies released Japanese word processor software for the machine, such as , , and . NEC themselves released which was a rebranded version of Yukara, but it was not a success. In addition to office software, companies like Enix and Koei released many popular games for the system, establishing the PC-8801 as a strong gaming platform. By November 1983, the PC-8801 had shipped 170,000 units. The PC-8801's direct successor, the PC-8801mkII, came with a JIS level 1 kanji font ROM, a smaller case and keyboard, and, in the models 20 and 30, one or two internal 5¼-inch 2D floppy disk drives. This set of PC-8800 computers sold more units than the PC-9800 series at that time.
In 1996, there were an estimated five billion standard floppy disks in use. Then, distribution of larger packages was gradually replaced by CD-ROMs, DVDs and online distribution. An attempt to enhance the existing -inch designs was the SuperDisk in the late 1990s, utilizing very narrow data tracks and a high precision head guidance mechanism with a capacity of 120 MB and backward- compatibility with standard -inch floppies; a format war briefly occurred between SuperDisk and other high-density floppy-disk products, although ultimately recordable CDs/DVDs, solid-state flash storage, and eventually online storage would render all these removable disk formats obsolete. External USB-based floppy disk drives are still available, and many modern systems provide firmware support for booting from such drives.
The Alles Machine consisted of three main parts; an LSI-11 microcomputer, the programmable sound generators, and a number of different input devices. The system was packaged into a large single unit, and weighed 300 pounds - the designers optimistically referred to it as being portable.Alles 1976, pg. 5 The microcomputer was supplied with two 8-inch floppy disk drives (from Heathkit, which sold their own LSI-11 machine, the H11) and an AT&T; color video terminal. It was connected to a customized analog-to-digital converter that sampled the inputs at 7 bit resolution 250 times a second. The input devices consisted of two 61-key piano keyboards, four 3-axis analog joysticks, a bank of 72 sliders, and various switches.
Until the late 1990s, many PC BIOS setup programs still allowed the user to set WPcom numbers and other drive parameters for use with older hard disk types should the need arise; it wasn't always made very clear to the user that his more modern drive would almost certainly ignore the setting. Since then, the WPcom number is no longer even offered as a BIOS setting any more, as it is considered an obsolete technology. Floppy disk controllers still need to deal with precompensation, but since there have never been more than five or six common floppy drive types in use on PCs, all of which need the same kind of precompensation, there was never a need for a BIOS setting concerning precompensation on floppy disk drives.
A fuzzy bit may be an unwanted side effect of a defective storage medium or reader, but can also be a deliberately generated effect. For example, in the 1980's and 1990's, with magnetic media such as floppy disks such bits were deliberately created by poor formatting to serve as a copy protection mechanism. An example of this is the game Dungeon Master, in which inconsistency in multiple read access to such a bit was checked when loading the software and was a prerequisite for operation. Since usual floppy disk drives could not produce such bits, this was an effective mechanism for preventing illegal copies and one of the only possible approaches to circumvent such protection was to disable the check routine in the software.
ATAPI devices with removable media, other than CD and DVD drives, are classified as ARMD (ATAPI Removable Media Device) and can appear as either a super-floppy (non-partitioned media) or a hard drive (partitioned media) to the operating system. These can be supported as bootable devices by a BIOS complying with the ATAPI Removable Media Device BIOS Specification, originally developed by Compaq Computer Corporation and Phoenix Technologies. It specifies provisions in the BIOS of a personal computer to allow the computer to be bootstrapped from devices such as Zip drives, Jaz drives, SuperDisk (LS-120) drives, and similar devices. These devices have removable media like floppy disk drives, but capacities more commensurate with hard drives, and programming requirements unlike either.
The original USB 1.0 specification, which was introduced in January 1996, defined data transfer rates of 1.5 Mbit/s Low Speed and 12 Mbit/s Full Speed. Draft designs had called for a single-speed 5 Mbit/s bus, but the low speed was added to support low-cost peripherals with unshielded cables, resulting in a split design with a 12 Mbit/s data rate intended for higher-speed devices such as printers and floppy disk drives, and the lower 1.5 Mbit/s rate for low data rate devices such as keyboards, mice and joysticks. Microsoft Windows 95, OSR 2.1 provided OEM support for the devices in August 1997. The first widely used version of USB was 1.1, which was released in September 1998.
ISA slots remained for a few more years, and towards the turn of the century it was common to see systems with an Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) sitting near the central processing unit, an array of PCI slots, and one or two ISA slots near the end. In late 2008, even floppy disk drives and serial ports were disappearing, and the extinction of vestigial ISA (by then the LPC bus) from chipsets was on the horizon. PCI slots are "rotated" compared to their ISA counterparts--PCI cards were essentially inserted "upside-down," allowing ISA and PCI connectors to squeeze together on the motherboard. Only one of the two connectors can be used in each slot at a time, but this allowed for greater flexibility.
ProDOS was released to address shortcomings in the earlier Apple operating system (called simply DOS), which was beginning to show its age. Apple DOS only has built-in support for 5.25" floppy disks and requires patches to use peripheral devices such as hard disk drives and non-Disk-II floppy disk drives, including 3.5" floppy drives. ProDOS adds a standard method of accessing ROM-based drivers on expansion cards for disk devices, expands the maximum volume size from about 400 kilobytes to 32 megabytes, introduces support for hierarchical subdirectories (a vital feature for organizing a hard disk's storage space), and supports RAM disks on machines with 128kB or more of memory. ProDOS addresses problems with handling hardware interrupts, and includes a well-defined and documented programming and expansion interface, which Apple DOS had always lacked.
Requiring two floppy disk drives and 192 KB of RAM, Microsoft described the software as a device driver for MS-DOS 2.0. By supporting cooperative multitasking in tiled windows when using well-behaved applications that only used DOS system calls, and permitting non-well-behaved applications to run in a full screen, Windows differed from both Visi On and Apple Computers Lisa by immediately offering many applications. Unlike Visi On, Windows developers did not need to use Unix to develop IBM PC applications; Microsoft planned to encourage other companies, including competitors, to develop programs for Windows by not requiring a Microsoft user interface in their applications. Many manufacturers of MS-DOS computers such as Compaq, Zenith, and DEC promised to provide support, as did software companies such as Ashton-Tate and Lotus.
Modified frequency modulation (MFM) is a run-length limited (RLL) coding scheme used to encode the actual data-bits on most floppy disks. It was first introduced in hard disk drives in 1970 with the IBM 3330 and then in floppy disk drives beginning with the IBM 53FD in 1976. MFM is a modification to the original digital frequency modulation (also known as FM encoding, delay coding and Miller coding) for encoding data on single-density floppy disks and some early hard disk drives. Due to the minimum spacing between flux transitions that is a property of the disk, head and channel design, MFM, which guarantees at most one flux transition per data bit, can be written at higher density than FM, which can require two transitions per data bit.
After Adam Osborne sold his computer book-publishing company to McGraw-Hill in 1979, he decided to market an inexpensive portable computer with bundled software and hired Lee Felsenstein to design it. The resulting Osborne 1 featured a 5 inch (127 mm) 52-column display, two floppy-disk drives, a Z80 microprocessor, and 64 KB of RAM. It could fit under an airplane seat and survive being accidentally dropped. The bundled software package included the CP/M operating system, the BASIC programming language, the WordStar word processing package, and the SuperCalc spreadsheet program. Osborne obtained the software in part by offering stock in the new Osborne Computer Corporation, which he founded in January 1981. For example, MicroPro International received 75,000 shares and $4.60 for each copy of WordStar Osborne distributed with his computers.
The United States Marine Corps was a major Series/1 customer in the late 1970s and into the early 1980s. IBM created a ruggedized, portable version with a green plastic and metal housing for field and shipboard use known as the IBM Series I Model 4110. The central processor unit boasted twin 1 megabyte 8 inch floppy disk drives, an 8-inch green monitor with 25 × 80 character resolution (and seldom-used graphics capability) and 16 kilobytes of RAM which was upgraded to 32 kilobytes in 1984. Each standard 'suite' included the CPU unit, a keyboard, and a 132 column dot-matrix printer with a separate cooling-fan base. This suite was transported in two green, foam-lined, waterproof, locking plastic cases; each weighing over 100 pounds loaded.
Like the cosmetically similar Rainbow 100 and DECmate II (also introduced at that time), the PRO series used the LK201 keyboard and 400kB single-sided quad-density floppy disk drives (known as RX50The RX50 FAQ), and offered a choice of color or monochrome monitors. For DEC, none of the three would be favorably received, and the industry instead standardized on Intel 8088-based IBM PC compatibles which were all binary program compatible with each other. In some ways, the PDP-11 microprocessors were technically superior to the Intel-based chips. While the 8088 was restricted to 1MB of memory because of its 20-bit address bus, DEC microprocessors were capable of accessing 4MB with their 22-bit addressing (although direct addressing of memory was limited in both approaches to 64KB segments, limiting the size of individual code and data objects).
Due to a US antitrust consent decree with IBM, the PC AT architecture was functionally an open design, and IBM's efforts to trademark the AT name largely failed. Many 286-based PCs were modeled after it and marketed as "AT- compatible." The label also became a standard term in reference to PCs that used the same type of power supply, case, and motherboard layout as the 5170. "AT-class" became a term describing any machine which supported the same BIOS functions, 80286 or greater processor, 16-bit expansion slots, keyboard interface, 1.2 MB 5.25 inch floppy disk drives and other defining technical features of the IBM PC AT. Popular brands of AT clones included the Tandy 3000, Compaq Deskpro 286, HP Vectra, Zenith Z-286, Epson Equity Models II+ and III, and Commodore PC-30 and PC-40.
Pournelle wrote The User's Column (later "Computing at Chaos Manor" column) in Byte. In it Pournelle described his experiences with computer hardware and software, some purchased and some sent by vendors for review, at his home office. Because Pournelle was then, according to the magazine, "virtually Bytes only writer who was a mere user—he didn't create compilers and computers, he merely used them", it began as "The User's Column" in July 1980. Subtitled "Omikron TRS-80 Boards, NEWDOS+, and Sundry Other Matters", an Editor's Note accompanied the article: Pournelle stated that He introduced to readers "my friend Ezekiel, who happens to be a Cromemco Z-2 with iCom 8-inch soft-sectored floppy disk drives"; he also owned a TRS-80 Model I, and the first subject discussed in the column was an add-on that permitted it to use the same data and CP/M applications as the Cromemco.
25-pin sockets on Macintosh computers are typically single-ended SCSI connectors, combining all signal returns into one contact (again in contrast to the Centronics C50 connector typically found on the peripheral, supplying a separate return contact for each signal), while older Sun hardware uses DD50 connectors for Fast-SCSI equipment. As SCSI variants from Ultra2 onwards used differential signalling, the Macintosh DB25 SCSI interface became obsolete. The complete range of D-sub connectors also includes DA15s (one row of 7 and one of 8), DC37s (one row of 18 and one of 19), and DD50s (two rows of 17 and one of 16); these are often used in industrial products, the 15-way version being commonly used on rotary and linear encoders. The early Macintosh and late Apple II computers used an obscure 19-pin D-sub for connecting external floppy disk drives.
Seagate 20 MB HDD and Western Digital Controller for PC Hard disk drives for personal computers (PCs) were initially a rare and very expensive optional feature; systems typically had only the less expensive floppy disk drives or even cassette tape drives as both secondary storage and transport media. However by the late '80s, hard disk drives were standard on all but the cheapest PC and floppy disks were used almost solely as transport media. Most hard disk drives in the early 1980s were sold to PC end users by systems integrators such as the Corvus Disk System or the systems manufacturer such as the Apple ProFile. The IBM PC XT in 1983, included an internal standard 10 MB hard disk drive, and soon thereafter internal hard disk drives proliferated on personal computers, one popular type was the ST506/ST412 hard drive and MFM interface.
Optical disc drives are an integral part of standalone appliances such as CD players, DVD players, Blu-ray disc players, DVD recorders, certain desktop video game consoles, such as Sony PlayStation 4, Microsoft Xbox One, Nintendo Wii U, upcoming consoles Sony PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and also in older consoles, such as the Sony PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and certain portable video game consoles, such as Sony PlayStation Portable (using proprietary now discontinued UMDs). They are also very commonly used in computers to read software and consumer media distributed on disc and to record discs for archival and data exchange purposes. Floppy disk drives, with capacity of 1.44 MB, have been made obsolete: optical media are cheap and have vastly higher capacity to handle the large files used since the days of floppy discs, and the vast majority of computers and much consumer entertainment hardware have optical writers. USB flash drives, high-capacity, small, and inexpensive, are suitable where read/write capability is required.
C64 Direct- to-TV Clones are computers that imitate C64 functions. In the middle of 2004, after an absence from the marketplace of more than 10 years, PC manufacturer Tulip Computers BV (owners of the Commodore brand since 1997) announced the C64 Direct-to-TV (C64DTV), a joystick-based TV game based on the C64 with 30 video games built into ROM. Designed by Jeri Ellsworth, a self-taught computer designer who had earlier designed the modern C-One C64 implementation, the C64DTV was similar in concept to other mini-consoles based on the Atari 2600 and Intellivision, which had gained modest success earlier in the decade. The product was advertised on QVC in the United States for the 2004 holiday season. By "hacking" the circuit board, it is possible to attach C1541 floppy disk drives, a second joystick, and PS/2 keyboards to these units, which gives the DTV devices nearly all the capabilities of a full Commodore 64.
The 1977 Apple II, shown here with two Disk II floppy disk drives and a 1980s-era Apple Monitor II. The Apple II series (trademarked with square brackets as "Apple ][" and rendered on later models as "Apple //") is a family of home computers, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), and launched in 1977 with the original Apple II. In terms of ease of use, features, and expandability, the Apple II was a major advancement over its predecessor, the Apple I, a limited-production bare circuit board computer for electronics hobbyists. Through 1988, a number of models were introduced, with the most popular, the Apple IIe, remaining relatively unchanged into the 1990s. A 16-bit model with much more advanced graphics and sound, the Apple IIGS, was added in 1986. While compatible with earlier Apple II systems, the IIGS had significantly different hardware, more in league with the Atari ST and Amiga.
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.
After 1980, Apple DOS entered into a state of stagnation as Apple concentrated its efforts on the ill-fated Apple III computer and its SOS operating system. Two more versions of Apple DOS, both still called DOS 3.3 but with some bug fixes and better support for the new Apple IIe model, were released in early and mid-1983. Without third-party patches, Apple DOS can only read floppy disks running in a 5.25-inch Disk II drive and cannot access any other media, such as hard disk drives, virtual RAM drives, or 3.5-inch floppy disk drives. The structure of Apple DOS disks (particularly the free sector map, which was restricted to part of a single sector) is such that it is not possible to have more than 400 KB available at a time per drive without a major rewrite of almost all sections of the code; this is the main reason Apple abandoned this iteration of DOS in 1983, when Apple DOS was entirely replaced by ProDOS.
Windows command shell Windows makes use of the FAT, NTFS, exFAT, Live File System and ReFS file systems (the last of these is only supported and usable in Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2016, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10; Windows cannot boot from it). Windows uses a drive letter abstraction at the user level to distinguish one disk or partition from another. For example, the path represents a directory on the partition represented by the letter C. Drive C: is most commonly used for the primary hard disk drive partition, on which Windows is usually installed and from which it boots. This "tradition" has become so firmly ingrained that bugs exist in many applications which make assumptions that the drive that the operating system is installed on is C. The use of drive letters, and the tradition of using "C" as the drive letter for the primary hard disk drive partition, can be traced to MS-DOS, where the letters A and B were reserved for up to two floppy disk drives.
While many eight-bit home computers of the 1980s, such as the BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Apple II series, the Atari 8-bit, the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum series and others could load a third-party disk-loading operating system, such as CP/M or GEOS, they were generally used without one. Their built-in operating systems were designed in an era when floppy disk drives were very expensive and not expected to be used by most users, so the standard storage device on most was a tape drive using standard compact cassettes. Most, if not all, of these computers shipped with a built-in BASIC interpreter on ROM, which also served as a crude command line interface, allowing the user to load a separate disk operating system to perform file management commands and load and save to disk. The most popular home computer, the Commodore 64, was a notable exception, as its DOS was on ROM in the disk drive hardware, and the drive was addressed identically to printers, modems, and other external devices.
A second EPROM is used as a fixed character generator, providing upper and lower case ASCII characters and graphic symbols; the character generator is not accessible to the CPU. The eighth bit of an ASCII character is used to select underlined characters. Serial communications is through a memory-mapped Motorola MC6850 Asynchronous Communications Interface Adapter (ACIA); a jumper on the motherboard allows the MC6850 to be set for either 300 and 1200 baud or 600 and 2400 baud communications, but other bit rates are not available. The floppy disk drives are interfaced through a Fujitsu 8877 disk controller integrated circuit, a second-source of the Western Digital 1793. The parallel port is connected through a memory-mapped Motorola MC6821 Peripheral Interface Adapter (PIA) which allows the port to be fully bidirectional; the Osborne manuals claim that the port implemented the IEEE-488 interface bus but this is rarely used. The parallel port use a card-edge connector etched on the main board, exposed through a hole in the case; any IEEE-488 or printer cable has to be modified for the Osborne.
After selling a few kits, MCP became convinced there was a much bigger market for an improved model sold as a completed working system. However the original kit version lacked many features that prevented its use as a serious computer system. Because the original designer had left the company another employee completely redesigned most of the system, (adding a display snow remover circuit, true 80/64 column text mode support, (with different size letters for TRS-80 and CP/M mode, so that in TRS-80 mode the full screen was also used, not just a 64×16 portion of the 80×25 screen) with an improved font set (adding "gray scale" version of the TRS-80 mozaik graphics and many special PETSCII like characters), and a more flexible and reliable floppy disk controller and keyboard interface plus many other small improvements), also an enclosure was developed for the main computer system, (in the form of a 19-inch rack for the Eurocards) and for two floppy disk drives and the power supply. A software engineer was hired to write the special "dual boot mode" BIOS and the special CP/M BIOS.
The first programmable pocket calculator was the HP-65, in 1974; it had a capacity of 100 instructions, and could store and retrieve programs with a built-in magnetic card reader. Two years later the HP-25C introduced continuous memory, i.e., programs and data were retained in CMOS memory during power-off. In 1979, HP released the first alphanumeric, programmable, expandable calculator, the HP-41C. It could be expanded with random access memory (RAM, for memory) and read-only memory (ROM, for software) modules, and peripherals like bar code readers, microcassette and floppy disk drives, paper-roll thermal printers, and miscellaneous communication interfaces (RS-232, HP-IL, HP-IB). The HP-65, the first programmable pocket calculator (1974) The first Soviet pocket battery-powered programmable calculator, Elektronika B3-21, was developed by the end of 1976 and released at the start of 1977. The successor of B3-21, the Elektronika B3-34 wasn't backward compatible with B3-21, even if it kept the reverse Polish notation (RPN). Thus B3-34 defined a new command set, which later was used in a series of later programmable Soviet calculators.
It proved a spectacular failure because IBM deliberately limited its capabilities and expansion possibilities in order to avoid cannibalizing sales of the profitable PC. IBM management believed that if they made the PCjr too powerful too many buyers would prefer it over the bigger, more expensive PC. Poor reviews in the computer press and poor sales doomed the PCjr. Tandy Corporation capitalized on IBM's blunder with its PCjr-compatible Tandy 1000 in November. Like the PCjr it was pitched as a home, education, and small- business computer featuring joystick ports, better sound and graphics (same as the PCjr but with enhancements), combined with near-PC/DOS compatibility (unlike Tandy's earlier Tandy 2000). The improved Tandy 1000 video hardware became a standard of its own, known as Tandy Graphics Adapter or TGA. Later Tandy produced Tandy 1000 variants in form factors and price-points even more suited to the home computer market, comprised particularly by the Tandy 1000 EX and HX models (later supplanted by the 1000 RL), which came in cases resembling the original Apple IIs (CPU, keyboard, expansion slots, and power supply in a slimline cabinet) but also included floppy disk drives.
PPG continued to develop and release digital synthesizers, most of which were met with little success. In 1979, PPG introduced the 340/380 System, a complex digital synthesizer which consisted of the 340 Processor Unit, the 340 Generator Unit, and the 380 Event Generator (a 16-track sequencer). It also came with a "Computer Terminal" which included a monitor, 8-inch floppy disk drives, and a 5 octave keyboard used for manual playing of events into the sequencer and for polyphonic playing with the 340 Wave Generator). Despite its own shortcomings, which included its complex functionality and its high price, it received publicity when it was used by Tangerine Dream and Thomas Dolby during the early 1980s. In 1980, Wolfgang Palm introduced a new concept, dubbed "wavetable synthesis". Wavetable synthesis allowed for the storage of short samples of a larger soundwave into individual slots of a “wavetable” that was stored in the memory of the system. The first PPG synthesizer to implement wavetable synthesis was the Wavecomputer 360, released in 1980 in two versions - the 360A, with 4 oscillators, and the 360B, with 8. However, the synthesizer sounded relatively thin, a consequence of having only one oscillator per voice and the typical limited polyphony of most synthesizers of its era.

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