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We can say that there was 3 kinds of floppy drives : - Drive by a floppy controller chip : Controlled by a WDC, Intel or custom ASIC. For example Amstrad, Sinc

We can say that there was 3 kinds of floppy drives : - Drive by a floppy controller chip : Controlled by a WDC, Intel or custom ASIC. For example Amstrad, Sinclair +3 or Amiga floppy drives. - Full intelligent : Like Commodore or Atari 8 bit floppy, that carries a computer inside. - Dumb : Like Apple II and I think that IBM PCs. Full intelligent not was a bad idea when the home computers had these low speeds, as could (on theory), read/write the floppy and at same time do other stuff on the computer. Also, allowed to move the file system implementation and part of the I/O firmware to these embed computer to the floppy drive. But to work nice, need a fast and good connection to the computer. Having a serial communication via bit-bagging as did Commodore, killed it.

ajross 8y ago
> Full intelligent not was a bad idea when the home computers had these low speeds That's the excuse, but no. In practice the actual software run on those machines was synchronous. You'd load the game/document, work/play, then save. There wasn't enough space in a 48k world for software complex enough to have background tasks. Honestly the only example I can think of where anyone did anything like this was the animated splash screens during load that some of the later Lucasfilm games on Atari had. And they never would have bothered if the disk was as fast as Apple's. Also, FWIW: the PC had a "dumb" drive enclosure, but the controller was an ASIC on the motherboard. And it was drivable via a separate DMA chip, allowing true background operation. With 10x the memory of the 8 bit systems, it was not uncommon to find DOS tricks to do background I/O (e.g. RAMdisks were very popular).