pete@utgpu.UUCP (06/27/87)
In article <1612@oliveb.UUCP> dragon@oliveb.UUCP (Give me a quarter or I'll touch you) writes: >in article <12901@topaz.rutgers.edu>, lachac@topaz.rutgers.edu (Gerard Lachac) says: >> In article <1502@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> braner@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (braner) writes: >>>Question: will Atari convert the STs to a 1.4-Megabyte disk format compatible >>>with the new IBM PS/2 machines? >>> >>>- Moshe Braner >> >> If I'm not mistaken, aren't the drives on the PS/2 series using some kind of >> propriatory drive/controller combo that makes them ultra expensive?? (and also >> not compatible with the drives in the current ST's) >But is it so important? The going price for 2 mb 3.5" floppies is about $6 >a piece. I prefer taking more room with the smaller disks :-) I've never been a big IBM fan, but there latest move with the PS/2 line strikes me as being unbelievable unfair to users. 1. IBM machines are used mostly in business environments. 2. probably 60% of all PC in business environments have hard drives. This figure is rising extrordinarily fast as the price of hard drives come down, and managers become aware of the floppies limitations. Where does this leave the floppy? It becomes (or will become) a medium simply for the EXCHANGE and distribution of data. (Sort of like in a tape in a unix environment, only it is pretty ugly to back up an Hdrive to floppy). Thus the obvious question becomes WHY introduce a machine with an order of 2 or 4 storage increase on FLOPPIES, at the expense of making all older machines incompatible. Simple. Sales. (No Guff!). IBM saw a great oportunity to introduce some planned obsolesence into there line. Now all managers will have to have AT LEAST one PS/2 in there department, if ANY manager has one. Simply in order to read disks. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE atari. DON'T introduce another disk format (1 vs. 2 sides is *MORE* than enough!). Instead, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE work on introducing a cheaper 20meg drive. There is really no reason that they shouldn't be selling for less than $700 CANADIAN. I can handle buggy software, and poor (if any?) documentation, but if Atari were to become like IBM, I would shrink into a dark corner and cry until the age of the micro was over!!! Pete Santangeli pete@utgpu
braner@batcomputer.UUCP (06/28/87)
[] While I also can feel the grief of too-fast technology introduction, and 'me too' not a great fan of IBM, I still disagree with those calling on us to suffer with small floppies for too long. Hard disks are fine for many things but even 20 Megs get filled up too quickly and current-day hard disks are very fragile. I would much prefer large-capacity, high-speed, robust REMOVABLE media. The new micro-Bernoullies hold great promise (at a very high price as yet), and any advancement in floppies (to 1.4 Megs and beyond) is very welcome with me. I agree that floppies are a means of data transfer - and that may call for having a mixture of drive types on one machine and/or making the bigger drives compatible with smaller ones for both reading and writing (as the 1.4Meg ones reportedly are). - Moshe Braner [I call the 720K floppy 'small' when 18 months ago I used 140K floppies?] [One more BASF disk went bad on me yesterday. A few more and they'll be all gone...]
pes@ux63.bath.ac.uk (Smee) (07/10/87)
I'll go with Moshe on this. If we took the original sender's 'leave it alone' literally, we'd all still be using 1/8th meg 8-inch disks. Historically, 'packing' media hasn't been too painful as long as the physical characteristics of the media stay the same. 800/1600/6250 bpi tape drives are quite common. Drives which will read 80-track 5.25 or 3.00 inch disks will also handle 40-track ones. And, a proper QUAD-density 3.5 drive should do the right thing to current DD disks. (And, of course, a DS drive can use SS disks.) The only real disadvantage is that you must assume the lowest common denominator when interchanging or distributing disks (SS-DD for 3.5 drives). Our experience is that most disks stay with the one machine they were created on, which means that the new QD wins big in saving local stoarge, the cost being that you've got to remember to keep some DD's around for transporting data. Far as costs go, sounds like I should come to the States to buy my disks. Going price over here (for quality Branded disks) is (in packs of 10) about 6 dollars each for DS, little under 4 dollars for SS. Sigh... (Cameras and computers, my 2 hobbies, are distributed without regard for exchange rates, is my guess. In general, any given item for either costs the same IN NUMBERS in the US and the UK, which means, at current exchange rates, the UK price is about 1.6 times the US one.)