1541 vs. Apple II disk

[Dave Farquhar]

I was a Commodore fan 20 years ago, and have more allegiance to Asus today than to anyone else. I never converted to Apple.

But anyway, yeah, Apple's margins were sky-high. Commodore had some advantage because they were making so many of their own chips while Apple had to buy everything (including some chips from Commodore or its licensees). The price war took out a lot of companies, and ultimately it turned out that it hurt Commodore too. The funny thing is though, when you read Infoworld's archives, in 1984 it sure seemed like Apple was the less healthy of the two companies. I do think Commodore made up some of the difference in volume. Apple sold 5-6 million Apple IIs (all models); Commodore sold 30 million C-64s, 4 million C-128s, and 2.5 million VIC-20s. That's a lot of machines, especially for that era.

I always heard that the later lever-door 1541s were better. I had a trapdoor 1541 for a couple of years and it did fine; at my school they had both, but under those conditions (running mostly PD software and almost no stuff with copy prevention) you'd expect them to stay in alignment. My 1571 did really well for many years after we upgraded. I still have our 128 but need to figure out what's wrong with it. Probably the power supply. My mom used the 128 for word processing into the mid 1990s. It had a good run.

 

[geoffm3]

Aside from the expandability aspect of the Apple II, hardwarewise it was a crummy machine compared to the C-64 IMO. The C-64 had better graphics and sound, same processor, and the same amount of RAM.

I think where Commodore really screwed up was with trying to tailor specific machines to different groups (see, C-16, Plus/4, C-128) instead of coming out with a proper direct descendent of the C-64 that was 100% backward compatible. As much as I like the C-128, I don't count it since it was really three computers in one. It's not really clear if the C-64GS/C-65 would have fulfilled that role either, since it sounds like it wasn't terribly compatible....at least in the engineering samples.

 

[Captain Midnight]

Commodore also ran their disks on a serial interface, so naturally they're going to be slow. Then again, this is a 1 Mhz computer, so having a blazing fast floppy disk drive doesn't really seem natural to the machine and to a point, would be useless anyway. One thing both computers had in common as well as the GCR method of encoding disks. The 64 seems pretty good, but I have to say Woz's design on the Apple II floppy in the 70s really shows how "elegant" the design of that machine really was and how far designers and programmers would go to cram 5k extra onto a disk. I've said this many times, but if we had that kind of mentality today in the programming/design world of computing, Windows would fit nicely on an EPROM, load in 5 seconds or less, and basically never crash. Oh well....

 

[MikeS]

Commodore also ran their disks on a serial interface, so naturally they're going to be slow....

Sigh... What is this recurring drivel about a slow "serial interface"?

First of all, when you say "Commodore used..." the IEC interface was only used on the inexpensive VICs, C64s etc.; the rest used the parallel IEEE488 interface.

Second, just in case there's still confusion, unlike ATARI's SIO bus the C64's IEC interface is not a "serial interface" in the usual sense, i.e. an RS-232 com port; also, "a serial" interface does not mean "naturally slow"; the hard disk in your dual-core laptop probably uses a S(erial)ATA interface.

The slow speed of a C64 had nothing to do with the interface but was a result of compromises made in the C64's bus driving firmware; with the accelerator software that pretty well everyone had, disk access was in the same ballpark as everyone else, even faster than some AFAIK.

If we had that kind of mentality today in the programming/design world of computing, Windows would fit nicely on an EPROM, load in 5 seconds or less, and basically never crash. Oh well....

That mentality is alive and well in embedded designs; what on earth makes you think that that kind of mentality would end up programming Windows?

 

[geoffm3]

Commodore also ran their disks on a serial interface, so naturally they're going to be slow. Then again, this is a 1 Mhz computer, so having a blazing fast floppy disk drive doesn't really seem natural to the machine and to a point, would be useless anyway. One thing both computers had in common as well as the GCR method of encoding disks. The 64 seems pretty good, but I have to say Woz's design on the Apple II floppy in the 70s really shows how "elegant" the design of that machine really was and how far designers and programmers would go to cram 5k extra onto a disk. I've said this many times, but if we had that kind of mentality today in the programming/design world of computing, Windows would fit nicely on an EPROM, load in 5 seconds or less, and basically never crash. Oh well....

While the Apple II disk design is simple, I don't know if I'd necessarily say they crammed a lot onto the disk. The 1541 got 30k more per disk. The Commodore 8250 got 2MB on a double density floppy. I think that's the most impressive as far as storage density of an old machine on 5.25" DD media.

I think one thing that Apple got right over Commodore come to think of it was the use of a real switching power supply. Power bricks and the bulky supply on the 1541 and IEEE drives was pretty lame.

I don't think that just because a drive is serial means that it's slow, and just because the drive is intelligent doesn't mean that it's all that more expensive to produce either. The Coleco ADAM drive for example felt pretty zippy (and it's serial link is 62.5kbps). It was also an intelligent drive. Used a WD FDC chip, a 6801 MCU, 8k ROM, and 1k of RAM. Parts count was pretty small on the controller itself and used a mostly off-the-shelf 5.25" single head mech (the only addition was a disk present switch).


EDIT: Sorry, I think it was actually around 1MB per disk on the 8250... but still impressive for DD.

 

[Chuck(G)]

There were other systems that got 900K+ on DD drives, but remember that the 8250 used an 80-cylinder drive, so the conventional capacity was 720/800K (e.g. DECmate II RX50 drive, Columbia 1600, ICL 35, Kaypro Pro-8, Otrona Attache...).

Other systems, such as Multitech got 1MB per floppy as well--and preceded the 8250 by a couple of years.

So not that unusual.

 

[geoffm3]

There were other systems that got 900K+ on DD drives, but remember that the 8250 used an 80-cylinder drive, so the conventional capacity was 720/800K (e.g. DECmate II RX50 drive, Columbia 1600, ICL 35, Kaypro Pro-8, Otrona Attache...).

Other systems, such as Multitech got 1MB per floppy as well--and preceded the 8250 by a couple of years.

So not that unusual.

I'm not that surprised really... after all, Commodore didn't make any of their floppy drive mechs, so other companies were free to do the same.