On 11 Dec 00 at 15:55, arachne-digest wrote:
>>Commodore had another version called the 8250, which was an external dual
>>drive. TWO megs of space! In the Commodore world, where even a long BASIC
>>program might be 38K, 2 meg was a LOT.
>>
>>Those drives were actually made for Commodore's PET/CBM line of computers,
>>with IEEE-488 parallel interfaces. For an ordinary C64 user to attach one,
>>he had to buy a special IEEE-488 interface, on top of buying the pricey
>>drive. And most C64 software expected unit 8 and possibly 9 as a drive, not
>>unit 8, drive 0 and drive 1, as the dual drives were set up. So, as you
>>say, unless a user really needed the space for a BBS or something, it was
>>much cheaper and less hassle to buy ordinary C= serial drives for a VIC, 64
>>or 128 system.
Our Commodore user group has/had a special dual disk drive that had a
special ROM installed that allowed you to disconnect the drive from
the 'puter and continue to copy disks. Very handy for a user group
with a shareware/freeware disk library. Additinally the parallel
interface was multiple times faster in data transfer than the old
serial bus 1541/1571/1581 et. al. drive. IIRC, the old 1541 without
any software/firmware enhancement had an effective transfer rate
equivalent to about 1200 baud. Ah, for the good old days! ;)
Regards,
Dale Mentzer
Chaos, panic and disorder...my work here is done.
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