Dale Mentzer wrote:
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! ;)
An MSD-SD2. Built like a truck. As you say, very popular with user groups
that needed to copy PD disks rapidly and without hassle. I've squirreled
away a couple too.
COMPUTE!'s Gazette once published a tape speedup program; it saved programs
on the Commodore Datassette tape drives in a special format, so they would
load faster. Using the speedup, I used to enjoy doing demonstrations
showing that you could load a program FASTER off a tape drive than using a
stock 1541! Not the fastest drive in the world, but how fast did you need
to be when a long BASIC program might be all of 38K?
