Thread
Mac+ OS floppy request
Hi - I'm new to Macs, I have just bought an Macintosh Plus with no disks. I read a Windows PC cannot make a floppy the little Mac+ can read, is that correct? If so I need OS 6.x on floppy.
If so, ahem... is there anyone who could provide me such a floppy? So basically I'm on the scrounge for OS disks and others that will make my little Mac+ run. I really want Alchemy the sound editing program. I'm in Gloucester, UK.
I'm sure this question has been raised many times before, sorry to duplicate, I did do a check first then hit the no PC can make disks brickwall.
If so, ahem... is there anyone who could provide me such a floppy? So basically I'm on the scrounge for OS disks and others that will make my little Mac+ run. I really want Alchemy the sound editing program. I'm in Gloucester, UK.
I'm sure this question has been raised many times before, sorry to duplicate, I did do a check first then hit the no PC can make disks brickwall.
I've got a few copies of 6.0.3, If it'll run on that system
The Mac Plus will run any System from version 3 up to version 7.5.x.
Systems older than 3 will likely work too, but they are not recommended, since the Mac Plus has newer a ROM than the machines for which these older systems were intended.
Systems older than 3 will likely work too, but they are not recommended, since the Mac Plus has newer a ROM than the machines for which these older systems were intended.
Can't PC floppy drives write double density? You'd think they could, having been encumbered with a compulsion for backwards-compatibility ever since RISC processors came out. (Not that I'm the one to talk, whining about Apple dropping AppleTalk from 10.4 to 10.5 and PPC in 10.6)
You could also try a zip drive, if you can find a cheap one for both the Mac (SCSI) and the PC (how did they connect zip drives back in the day?), handy storage instead of having to keep track of a stack of DD floppies. But if you can't find these items for cheap, get a second old Mac, one with Ethernet and a SuperDrive to use as a compatibility layer (though you can use it for all kinds of fun stuff).
You could also try a zip drive, if you can find a cheap one for both the Mac (SCSI) and the PC (how did they connect zip drives back in the day?), handy storage instead of having to keep track of a stack of DD floppies. But if you can't find these items for cheap, get a second old Mac, one with Ethernet and a SuperDrive to use as a compatibility layer (though you can use it for all kinds of fun stuff).
PC drives can read and write double density, but they use a different scheme to deal with data on floppies. Macintoshes use GCR (Group Code Recording) while DOS/Windows uses MFM (Modified Frequency Modulation). This is why Apple created the Apple File Exchange or PC Exchange file extension for System 6 and 7. GCR and MFM are two totally different schemes and they don't understand one another.
One thing you can do is use a Windows program like TransMac to put the contents within Apple/Mac disk images onto DOS/Windows floppy disks. This is useful when getting disk images of System 6 or 7 onto multiple floppies to boot up your Mac.
Another way would require you to have a more modern Mac (mid-1990s model, like a Power Macintosh 7500 or 6400, for example) that is Internet ready, download the disk images onto that machine, create the System 6 or 7 floppies there and then use those disks to boot a much older Mac. If you need 800K floppies, but all you have are lots of 1.44MB disks, you can turn them into 800K disks simply by placing a piece of scotch tape or masking tape over one of the holes. You'll want to place the tape over the hole that doesn't write protect the disk. Once you've taped the disks, place each one into the modern Mac's floppy drive and erase the disk. The Mac will assume they are 400K or 800K disks and ask you which one you want to format as. Choose 800K and you'll be all set.
The problem with using a zip drive is 2-fold. First, on most retro Macs, you need to have the Iomega driver version 4.2 or greater installed before using the disks. This means your retro Mac must be already running System 6 or 7 and have the driver installed along with the drive already connected. Second, and this is the double-edged sword, if you avoid the driver, you'd still have to have the retro Mac boot off of the hard drive and stick the zip disk in the drive at the "Welcome to Macintosh" message. This means basically you can't boot from the Zip disk into System 6 or 7.
A third problem is that when dealing with zip disks used on DOS/Windows and Mac, they use also different disk partition schemes; DOS/Windows uses FAT or FAT16, while Mac uses HFS or HFS+ (Extended). They are also not recognized when you go cross-platform, unless the Mac has Apple File Exchange installed.
Interceptor2, if you need a set of floppies made, send me a PM and I'll try to help out.
73s de Phreakout. :rambo:
This is why I stick to Macs that have a Superdrive in them, making disks is easy even on a brand new Windows system.
thanks to those who offered to provide me with disks, the good news is I've managed to make some disks myself! Hurrah!I needed Stuffit 5.11 (I think) and WinImage on my Win98 (because it has a floppy drive, my XP doesn't) - as suggested the SuperDrive thingy is also required.
I have now a 800k boot disk for my older Macs, first thing to do a remove the apps the little Macs don't need or use, also gee aint OS7 slow, OS 6 seems more like it.
Thanks to all who contributed. :approve:
But where's the fun in that?
The biggest challenge with 400K & 800K drives is that first disk. Once the machine is booted up, there's no problem. There exist any number of ways to transfer files, with a properly configured startup disk. Besides, having a Mac with a Superdrive that can run OS 7.5.5 at a minimum makes using a Mac without one moot vis-a-vis your Windows argument.
The most interesting observation here is that Apple came up with a fantastic solution that allowed a 3.5" disk to hold 10% more data, which in those days was a big deal. Yet the PC industry was so confident in their DOS stronghold thanks to the business world's confidence in IBM that instead of adopting the more useful variable speed drives, they stuck with a cheaper fixed-speed model. Clearly they did not see Apple's improvement as any kind of serious competition. Arguably this was not as important with DOS computers at the time since the graphic-less files tended to be much smaller. But, GCR vs. MFM is irrelevant since software exists to write that format on either platform. The compatibility problem between PCs and Macs for half-a-decade was not an encoding problem, but rather the ingenious method Apple employed to cram an extra 10% of data onto the same physical space, resulting in a hardware incompatibility which cannot be overcome on the PC side. For that, I do not fault Apple but the cheap PC industry.
Today I consider the difficulty of getting an original compact up and running a badge of honor for the foresight and level of quality to which Apple chose to hold the computer industry.
Meh.
Do you know who designed the physical format for the 3.5 inch floppy used today, BTW?
It is the Microfloppy Industry Committee.
It is the Microfloppy Industry Committee.
Note that I said "physical format". As you have encountered, different platforms used different logical formats for the same 3.5 inch floppy, not only IBM PC and Apple Mac but also Commodore Amiga and more. Generally these was based on the logical format the vendor previously used for older floppies. BTW, IBM was quite late in adopting the 3.5 inch microfloppy, only doing soon after the Mac Plus was released in 1986 with the IBM PC Convertible.
That is the weirdest, most blinders-on-to-reality propaganda-dripping kool-aid soaked rant in favor of a proprietary product entirely born of a certain company's self-destructive "Not Invented Here" mindset towards industry standards I've read in a long time. Bravo!
Apple's magical custom multi-speed drives are nothing other than a sad measure to salvage some barely worthwhile crumbs from the work they wasted on the "Twiggy" drive. Solely in order to prevent the complete destruction of their fragile egos they thus ensured that the Mac would be marginalized from the mainstream of business computing, forcing users to use "unconventional" and clumsy methods to transfer data rather than simply having the option of equipping their PCs with a 3 1/2 inch disk drive. (Said drive was already being shipped in several Hewlett-Packard machines and a slew of Japanese pseudo-PC clones and CP/M machines. And the Macintosh, predictably, suffered badly in business penetration until the Superdrive equipped models shipped several years later and finally provided some commonality in disk formats.) The "ghost of Twiggy" also saddled the Macintosh with a disk controller which *completely* monopolizes the CPU and requires *perfect* uninterrupted timing to work properly. A tradeoff like that was "acceptable" when the Disk ][ system was designed, as good off-the-shelf single-chip disk controllers didn't exist then, but they were present in vast abundance by 1980.
(And if you really want to crow about that 10% difference in capacity, take note that IBM shipped the AT the same year the Macintosh was introduced with 1.2 MB capacity 5.25 inch floppies, which makes Apple's 400K disks look pretty pathetic by comparison.)
Anyway. Whatever. EVERYTHING ABOUT THE MACINTOSH IS THE BEST THING THERE WILL EVER BE AND APPLE DOES NO WRONG... EVAR!
ooh.. we seem to be moving away from the subject of my post - I'm sure there was all sorts of things going off in the computer industry at the time, after all it was ground breaking stuff with huge profit potentals. I like the sound of a "Twiggy Drive" I do wonder if that would have kicked off a law suit with our (UK) fashion model Twiggy who was very popular in the sixties (she still does modelling).
But on the 800k per 3.5" floppy issue, my Ensoniq sampler keyboards (1992) all format to 800k which can be read in a PC. I think they use the std Western Digital floppy controller chip.
But on the 800k per 3.5" floppy issue, my Ensoniq sampler keyboards (1992) all format to 800k which can be read in a PC. I think they use the std Western Digital floppy controller chip.
Are you sure they hold a full 800K or 720K? The PC standard was 720K formatted.
Twiggy drives were brilliant conceptually, but poorly executed. Doubt there would have been a lawsuit, as "Twiggy" was merely their nickname. Their official name was FileWare to be released as UniFile and DuoFile for the Apple ///, but failed so miserably on the Lisa that they went away quickly. Had they worked, they would have been a boon in 1983 supporting 871K on a 5.25" drive well ahead of the industry standard.
As has been pointed out, the 3.5" floppy had already been incorporated in PCs, but failed to take off in the PC world, until Apple adopted them making them a standard. Also pointed out, the PC/AT introduced 1.2MB HD 5.25 drives in 1984, but they were incompatible with the existing DD disks, and IBM was plagued with compatibility problems, particularly accidental corruption of data and damaging disks (the AT also suffered from a high number of defective hard drives). Perhaps that was the death knell of the 5.25" drive? I wouldn't know however since I only ever used 400K & 800K 3.5" rigid disks on the Macintosh which were always highly reliable for me. As for recovering the "good" technology from a failed product, well that's generally the basis of all business models, and the reason we have the Macintosh and ProDos and GS/OS, among other innovations by Apple which outlived their prototypes and commercial failures.
IBM was very conservative in terms of the number of sectors they crammed onto a track (9 512 byte sectors double-density, 18 "high density") because they wanted to ensure reliability. It's very possible to cram more onto a disk with MFM by reducing the distance between sectors. Several formatting programs (like 2M and FDFORMAT) were available to create higher-capacity disks usable under DOS, and in fact both IBM and Microsoft used higher-capacity nonstandard formats for software distribution (See the links for DMF and XDF on the 2M page).
Cramming one more sector per track gives you a disk that matches Apple's 800k format. (on an 80 track disk. On a stock 40 track PC drive you'd get 400k, again matching Apple's single-sided drives.) I will grant that you can make the case that Apple's varying-number-of-sectors model "spreads the data more evenly" across the disk and thus would tend to be more reliable when reading the inner tracks, but the market has spoken as to whether the additional cost for the small bump in capacity/reliability was worthwhile.
IBM chose 40 track 5.25 drives when it designed the PC because they were a "conservative" choice. 77 and 80 track 5.25" floppy drives existed in 1981 but were considered "finicky" because the narrower head was more sensitive to alignment issues. (Keep in mind we're being dirty pool here in the first place comparing the technology of a 1981-vintage standard to a 1984 model.) However Commodore (8050 and 8250 drives), Tandy (Tandy 2000), and a number of other manufactures used them (and they were available via third-parties for many other machines) and with "standard" formats they held 720-800k on the same double-density media used in standard drives. Fileware was by no means a vast improvement on existing technology, it was just another case of Apple wanting to do their "own thing".
(Undoubtedly the reason "Twiggy" was so weird was to make it patentable, thus allowing Apple to force manufacturers to take a license and give them cut of every disk drive and media sale. It's not because its bizarre layout was actually technically superior.)
There were indeed issues with the 1.2 MB floppies, and in retrospect they might not have been the best idea ever. It wasn't because the technology itself was fundamentally flawed per se, it was because users couldn't be trained to use them reliably. (And really, you can't blame them) IBM would of been wise to have configured DOS to disallow writing to double-density disks with the high density drives, and it was also an unfortunate omission that the drives themselves lacked any ability to detect the density of the inserted media, thus allowing the user to format low-density media high-density and end up with a disk that would essentially erase itself over time.
Really I only really brought up the 1.2MB floppy to point out that 400K on one side of a disk was nowhere near "state of the art" for 1984. IBM' the company's behavior with regards to floppy drives was pretty deplorable, really. After going to 3.5 inch IBM for some bizarre reason decided to omit the density sensor from the custom drives they used in the IBM PS/2 series, despite it being standard issue across the rest of the industry. (Thus allowing users to shoot themselves in the foot exactly the same way they did with the 1.2MB disks. Users of clone systems didn't have this problem.) If there's a *real* lesson here it seems to be that conservative industrywide standards in the long run are "superior" to the overpriced proprietary solution that *any* single company puts out. The proprietary solutions may have some edge-case technical advantages, but if they're locked to a single brand they'll never achieve the penetration and longevity of the off-the-shelf products. Look at the guts of a MacBook today and it's clear that Apple has finally at least *partially* figured that out. ;^b
Insert the word "inexpensive" here. Things such as drive door detection, and track zero sensor were all eliminated to cut down on cost.
Perhaps, but the biggest differentiator was Twiggy's dual opposed heads, cutting access times by a factor two (while also making the thing damn near unmanufacturable). Looked great on paper.
Actually, all the documentation I can find on the Twiggy drive says they did not have "dual opposed heads", IE, four heads in total, but simply had a head opposed by a pressure pad on opposite sides of the spindle. (Apple's justification for that was they were concerned that opposed-head drives would wear the disk media out faster than the pressure pad would. Apparently they started work on Twiggy in 1978, before industry-standard double-sided drives were at all common.) There isn't going to to be any speed advantage in that geometry compared to two opposed heads, and in fact it's going to be slower, because Twiggy used a multi-speed motor.
(The two heads were moved by the same actuator, so when one head is near the edge the other is near the middle. Reading one head and then the other would require speeding up or slowing down the spindle by a large percentage, thus it would be quicker to step and read the next track with the same head. Once you've read one side you'll have to speed up or slow down the drive in one big jump and switch to the other head. This is going to be a lot slower than an opposed-head drive, which can simply switch heads between rotations and read twice as much data between steps.)
It's pretty astounding they didn't wise up after industry-standard drives were introduced and drop the concept. They spent *five years* banging their head uselessly on that concrete wall.
(The two heads were moved by the same actuator, so when one head is near the edge the other is near the middle. Reading one head and then the other would require speeding up or slowing down the spindle by a large percentage, thus it would be quicker to step and read the next track with the same head. Once you've read one side you'll have to speed up or slow down the drive in one big jump and switch to the other head. This is going to be a lot slower than an opposed-head drive, which can simply switch heads between rotations and read twice as much data between steps.)
It's pretty astounding they didn't wise up after industry-standard drives were introduced and drop the concept. They spent *five years* banging their head uselessly on that concrete wall.
I don't read the term "dual opposed heads" as 4 heads at all. I read it as two heads on opposite sides, which I believe is how the Twiggy drive operated and the reason it had two cutouts on opposite sides of the disk from each other. So I would propose it is a matter of semantic inference.
Also, I would point out that Apple is not the only computer company that spent years pounding its head against a wall trying to secure a monopoly with proprietary technology, nor the only company with the not-invented-here mentality. I would be surprised if the only reason many of the PC standards exists is because IBM established them by sheer volume of sales, but failed to secure any proprietary technology that led to their decline in market share at the hands of other PC clone makers. In fact their own ill-fated PCjr, and especially PS/2 system come to mind, when they finally woke up and realized what Microsoft in particular had done to them. And speaking of banging one's head against the wall, how long did Microsoft cling to DOS as the foundation of their operation systems when the entire industry was clearly moving toward UNIX? That's what standards will get you.
This talk of "industry standards" is disturbing. I detect a theme here which is, don't buck the system, go with the lemmings to the cliff edge if that's what everyone else is doing. Don't try to do anything new, since it will only sacrifice profits. Microsoft took that route and as a result are left holding a monopoly on a legacy bag of standards with pale imitations of other successful consumer tech products, which not only seem to be the wave of the future, but one which Apple is leading.
Also, I would point out that Apple is not the only computer company that spent years pounding its head against a wall trying to secure a monopoly with proprietary technology, nor the only company with the not-invented-here mentality. I would be surprised if the only reason many of the PC standards exists is because IBM established them by sheer volume of sales, but failed to secure any proprietary technology that led to their decline in market share at the hands of other PC clone makers. In fact their own ill-fated PCjr, and especially PS/2 system come to mind, when they finally woke up and realized what Microsoft in particular had done to them. And speaking of banging one's head against the wall, how long did Microsoft cling to DOS as the foundation of their operation systems when the entire industry was clearly moving toward UNIX? That's what standards will get you.
This talk of "industry standards" is disturbing. I detect a theme here which is, don't buck the system, go with the lemmings to the cliff edge if that's what everyone else is doing. Don't try to do anything new, since it will only sacrifice profits. Microsoft took that route and as a result are left holding a monopoly on a legacy bag of standards with pale imitations of other successful consumer tech products, which not only seem to be the wave of the future, but one which Apple is leading.
So... how bout that local sports team huh?
Glad to hear you got your floppies Interceptor2. Good luck finding Alchemy.
And Ensoniq, you say? 1992? I'm guessing ... original EPS? Or was the 16+ out by then?
Glad to hear you got your floppies Interceptor2. Good luck finding Alchemy.
And Ensoniq, you say? 1992? I'm guessing ... original EPS? Or was the 16+ out by then?
*snicker* They suck as usual, thank you. ;^)
Yes -- thanks, Mac128, for correctly interpreting what I wrote, despite my unintended efforts at obfuscation.
Those drives were certainly odd-looking, as were the floppies they used. I had a chance to buy a box of broken Twiggy drives back in the late 1980s. In a rare moment of self-restraint, I passed up the opportunity. Whenever I see how much these things sell for on eBay, I kick myself.
The Ensoniq Mirage used single sided floppies which were a custom 400k which can be read using appropriate software in DOS/Win, again I believe it uses a std WD floppy disk controller chip something like a WD1550. The Mirage is was relased in 1984
The EPS "Classic" was relased 1988 then the EPS16+ in 1990, it just so happens mine is a 1992 version. BTW it uses a 68000 + 68440
I know only specific floppy drives work with Ensoniq kit and as far as I know all can work on DOS/Windows.
Methinks maybe all the Motorola crowd were in cahoots, shareing and helping each other in developing what must have been cutting edge tech.
I like Mac128's comments "..I would point out that Apple is not the only computer company that spent years pounding its head against a wall trying to secure a monopoly with proprietary technology.." - yes indeed. As a tech based design company it is always hard to know when to stop working on a project/concept when there are potential huge profits to be made. I know of many, usually commercial people, who so chase that illusive patent onto which they want their name.
The EPS "Classic" was relased 1988 then the EPS16+ in 1990, it just so happens mine is a 1992 version. BTW it uses a 68000 + 68440
I know only specific floppy drives work with Ensoniq kit and as far as I know all can work on DOS/Windows.
Methinks maybe all the Motorola crowd were in cahoots, shareing and helping each other in developing what must have been cutting edge tech.
I like Mac128's comments "..I would point out that Apple is not the only computer company that spent years pounding its head against a wall trying to secure a monopoly with proprietary technology.." - yes indeed. As a tech based design company it is always hard to know when to stop working on a project/concept when there are potential huge profits to be made. I know of many, usually commercial people, who so chase that illusive patent onto which they want their name.
There's a gift in knowing where your talents lie. Apple in the early 1980's had a serious issue with thinking, based on their early success with the Apple ][, that they were "smarter" than everyone else and if they chose to do something they would not only succeed but be the "leaders of the industry". If you strip off all the rose-colored nostalgia we project backwards on them it's pretty obvious that they were not, and did not.
Name a major product of Apple's other than the Apple ][ and its variants that came out of Apple's labs between 1979 and 1984 and was an actual "success" on the market. (And the Mac itself didn't exactly set the world on fire, for that matter. It generated a lot of buzz but didn't actually sell that well.) It's a darn short list. They certainly had their interesting "research projects", aka, the Lisa, but when it came to nuts and bolts engineering of a marketable product they were *terrible*. Apple's engineering approach as epitomized by the Apple ][ was best described as analogous to Madman Muntz's "Mutzing", IE, taking a product and cutting out features and circuitry to make it as simple and as cheap as possible. (IE, the Apple ]['s producing a color display without according-to-Hoyle "proper" NTSC circuitry, and the Disk ]['s use of a "standard" disk drive mechanism with all the frills and "unessential" circuitry ripped out and compensated for with software.) Doing that certainly takes "talent", but that approach is poorly suited to engineering a complete complex product from scratch. As Captain Spock once noted: "As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create." Substitute "simplify" for "destroy".
Apparently Apple must of been compensating for its history of "Muntzing" because the Apple /// and the "Twiggy" drives are classic examples of products which are highly over-engineered and *more* complicated than necessary to provide their level of functionality, which is at best only a small percentage gain over the functionality of a "generic" product. The 400/800k floppy drives in the Macintosh are an example of the same mindset... to make it "better" they made Sony's drive *more complicated and expensive*, not less, and the result was an insignificant increase in capacity and increased costs for the user. Would it have made *any difference* in the long-term success of the Macintosh if they'd simply bought off-the-shelf floppy drives from Sony and replaced the IWM with a Western Digital WD1773? (Or simply adjusted the IWM to work with single-speed drives. Commodore made GCR drives that varied the number of sectors per track without varying the spindle speed. Clearly Commodore had better engineers than Apple.) Not a whit. Consumers wouldn't of cared at all, and the Mac would of been cheaper.
If you're going to innovate (and innovation is good), concentrate on places where there are significant gains to be made and real benefits to be provided to the user. Turning inward and engineering Rube Goldberg solutions that provide little or no positive benefits and only work to lock customers into your overpriced and proprietary product is... frankly pointless. It might increase your per-unit profits to set yourself up as the only source of parts for your product but by definition it limits your market to people gullible enough to get suckered into buying into your boarded-up little universe. (Unless you plan to go into the business of selling/licensing your proprietary innovation to all comers on reasonable terms so you can *create* the "industry standard". Which is something Apple has *never done*. When they make a proprietary product they keep it on the reservation and guard it so jealously that the world has no choice but to look somewhere else. The same thing happened to IBM with Microchannel and it cost them control of the PC marketplace.)
Anyway, that was my point about "innovation". Apple wasn't "innovating" with floppy drives, they were self-flagellating and trying to prove to the universe that they could innovate in the 1980s the way they did in the 1970s. They pretty much faceplanted on that one, sorry. They produced a perfectly usable product in the end, but that was mostly due to Sony's engineering succeeding despite having Apple's failure grafted onto it.
One word: Firewire. More recently: Facetime. "*never*"? Your bias is showing. :beige:
although 2 notable items since the 1970's isnt really a super track record
may not be a good track record, but its better than, for example, what I got. none.....
pretty much so with just about everyone here, has anyone developed anything that became industry standard? I haven't. maybe a couple of you here and there have, but certainly not every single member in here actively posting/reading. So that's why i feel that at least someone coming with something that becomes industry standard, whether its a good track record or not, is still good.
pretty much so with just about everyone here, has anyone developed anything that became industry standard? I haven't. maybe a couple of you here and there have, but certainly not every single member in here actively posting/reading. So that's why i feel that at least someone coming with something that becomes industry standard, whether its a good track record or not, is still good.
I dunno, hand me a few million dollars of VC money in a brand new industry ...
In 1990 I workd for a tech company, we were desiging and building graphic workstations as used in aerospace, serious money ones. One rival was the likes of Sun Sparc workstation and the Mac got mentioned a number of times. I can see now why the Mac IIfx was such a hit, that SuperMac graphics card and the speed were quite something. Alas as the PC started to get better and cheaper our products died.
Before that I worked designing colour monitors, I did a multisync, the other dev team were working on a better multisync. One day a salesman brought us in a NEC multisync all ready and working. It killed off our product there and then as customers were wanting that product now. Ours was much more adaptable, CRTs trypes and case styles but that saw a decline.
Yes it's hard to make an industry standard or it was then as the market would change so fast, besides nowerdays the far east have the techinical ability, manufacturing and ability to work as a team which we can't.
Before that I worked designing colour monitors, I did a multisync, the other dev team were working on a better multisync. One day a salesman brought us in a NEC multisync all ready and working. It killed off our product there and then as customers were wanting that product now. Ours was much more adaptable, CRTs trypes and case styles but that saw a decline.
Yes it's hard to make an industry standard or it was then as the market would change so fast, besides nowerdays the far east have the techinical ability, manufacturing and ability to work as a team which we can't.
Did you now? 8-o /commences brain-picking :lol: