Today
Amazingly people are still recovering data from Microdrives today, proving that they were indeed reliable for archiving data.
Infinite loop: the Sinclair ZX Microdrive story
They would, Clive Sinclair claimed on 23 April 1982, revolutionise home computer storage. Significantly cheaper than the established 5.25-inch and emerging 3.5-inch floppy drives of the time - though not as capacious or as fast to serve up files - ‘Uncle’ Clive’s new toy would “change the face of personal computing”, Sinclair …
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 08:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
3 inch disc
The 3 inch disc was actually adopted by Amstrad for the CPC. long before the PCW was launched. By all accounts they looked at 3.5 inch drives but they were too expensive and 5 inch wouldn't have been very elegant to build into the case (Sugar insisted the drive must be integrated). Sugar managed to source a supply of 3 inch drives and the rest is history.
As for me spelling it "disc" rather than "disk", well that's the spelling Amstrad always used with reference to the format.
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 14:10 GMT Jan 0
Re: 3 inch disc
Of course it's "disc". The word "disk" is a contraction of "diskette" (an IBM invention). There is nothing particularly British about "disc".
I'd always thought that the Microdrive had a continuous loop that was sort of folded inside the case. (Not with creases, but taking a sinuous path). What was that kind of tape drive called?
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Thursday 14th March 2013 10:14 GMT dajames
Re: 3 inch disc
Of course it's "disc". The word "disk" is a contraction of "diskette" (an IBM invention).
The derivation of "disc" is from the Latin discus so a 'c' seems a natural spelling, but US English and IT usage have always preferred 'k'. The 'k' spelling is earlier than the first use of "diskette", though, so you're wrong that "disk" is a contraction of that.
I first came across the 'k' spelling in Patrick Moore's writing on astronomy -- before I ever used a computer -- in phrases such as "with even a small telescope you will be able to make out the disk of Jupiter". It struck me as strange then and I stuck resolutely to the 'c' spelling for many years.
You're right, though, that "diskette"is the problem. If you write "disc" with a 'c' switching to 'k' for "diskette" just looks silly. What option does that leave? "Discettte"? Yuk. "Disquette" is better, but barely.
No: Best to adopt the spelling "disk", which is already current in much of the world, and be consistent with "diskette".
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Thursday 21st March 2013 22:24 GMT K.o.R
Re: 3 inch disc
I always think of it as: K is kind of a "square" letter and so it fits with the things that are square in appearance, i.e. hard disks and floppy disks (even though there is still a circular thing inside them, the bit you see is square/rectangular). Conversely, C is a "round" letter and so it fits with the things that are round in appearance, i.e. compact discs, digital versatile discs, blu-ray discs, etc.
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Thursday 14th March 2013 15:19 GMT Ralph B
Re: Ah, the OPD...
> hilarious manipulations of the text-to-speech facility.
May I refer my learned friend to an ancient Reg competition?
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 08:51 GMT Tom 7
Unfortunately it wasnt a lot better than a cassette tape store
I've even got the tapes for pascal and c for the spectrum somewhere!
You might say it was ahead of its time (offered features no one wanted) but to most home users it didn’t really offer a cost-effective advantage over a, probably already owned, £12 cassette deck and a note book for marking the counter readings for various bits and pieces. And from experience at a friends was more reliable.
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 22:24 GMT 2FishInATank
Re: These were great
LOAD * "m";1;"<program name>"
I set up little menus to be able to load one of two or three games off each cartridge.
The trick of repeatedly formatting the cartridge to get the maximum capacity out of them - I'm sure I had some which had a capacity of 99KB.
Now I need to dig into boxes and find them...
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 09:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Good article
Those days, of creativity and innovation, really were interesting. The microdrives as part of the affordability of the QL, for what it brought to market, meant that I was able to undertake commercial work turning statistical information into graphical reports (wow factor at the time) at a fraction of the cost of other options available at the time, at a time when the cost of alternatives was so high s to be unavailable. So my "ql" sig pays tribute to the system that started my time making a crust from IT.
The microdrives on the QL could be used as a swap file for large documents. A couple of years ago, I fired up a QL and found documents from the mid 80s on microdrive could still be read.
S
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 16:40 GMT Dan 55
Re: Yes - PlusD - thanks for that....
The one previous to the +D was the Disciple, from memory it looked much more like the Interface 1 and I think it could also take 5.25" floppy drives. Miles Gordon Technology manufactured the +D, I believe the same designers were also behind the Disciple but maybe in the guise of another company.
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 16:13 GMT gaz 7
I had a +D!
Was a better deal at the time the Microdrive as I got it half price in Boots cos the box was damaged.
Moved on from that to a +3 and then to a QL.
We still have some microdrive cartridges in a data safe at work. Keep meaning to rescue them in case anyone has a mad idea to tidy it. It still has 1/2" reels and manuals for an ICL series 39 that we decommissioned in 1991!
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 09:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
There was a video recorder that used a similar spool mechanism to the microdrives. I have a QL and a selection of microdrives.
The reason for the C64's disk drive costing so much was nothing to do with the cost of floppies. It was down to two things.
1. Massive demand, the 1541 was impossible to get hold of. Many people (including myself) bought a 3rd party unit instead.
2. The lack of disk drive functionality in the VIC20 and C64 ROMs. This meant that the disk drive couldn't be a dumb unit controlled by the host computer. The 1541 is a file serving computer with its own 6502 processor. This is obviously a very expensive way of making a disk drive.
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 09:44 GMT GettinSadda
Actually the reason that the 1541 drive is a computer rather than just a dumb bit of hardware is that it is basically a cut-down version of the PET 4040 disk drive which was an IEEE 488 (aka GPIB) devices. The concept is very much like IDE drives, which are what all modern hard drives are at heart.
The disk interface on the C64 is a serialized version of the parallel IEEE 488 bus and this meant that I was able to build a small interface board for my PET and convert the driver code in the ROM to use this rather than the native interface so I could run a 1541 from my PET.
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 11:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Which is essentially the same reason. They reused old technology for the software on the Vic20/C64 and therefore it had no disk controller or software to handle it. So formatting a disk is something like this:
OPEN 15,8,15,"N0:NAME,01":CLOSE 15
Instead of something more friendly like:
FORMAT "NAME", 8
They were criticised for sticking with an old version of BASIC in the C64, hence why you had to use pokes to do anything remotely interesting with the sound and graphics instead of high level calls like Sinclair BASIC.
Still, having bad BASIC must have pushed a lot of people into learning machine code and doing proper programming.
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 16:18 GMT Frumious Bandersnatch
you had to use pokes to do anything remotely interesting with the sound and graphics instead of high level calls like Sinclair BASIC
But on the other hand, the manual that came with the C64 was pretty good and included lists of addresses to peek/poke for changing colours, using sprites and making music/sounds with the SID chip. There really wasn't a need for extraneous syntactic sugar within the BASIC interpreter when the peek/poke addresses were documented. The more complete "Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide" even included schematics for the C64 itself along with a wealth of other technical info such as for accessing bank-switched RAM, a full memory map and even tables listing the frequencies in Hertz of standard musical notes and trig identities. It also had a pretty decent introduction to writing assembly on the 6510.
That document probably ranks as being the best technical manual for any computer I've ever used, even to this day. They just don't write manuals like that any more, unfortunately. I've still got two copies of it floating around :)
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 09:35 GMT Richard Scratcher
File? What file? I don't remember saving any files!
I owned a Sinclair QL and its Microdrives were a real let down. The QL was very late in delivery and had a "dongle" attached to fix the issues that made it so late.
For me, saving files to a Microdrive was a fingers-crossed affair and I would always verify that the file had been saved and then save it again to a second cartridge... or even a third.
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 18:18 GMT Frumious Bandersnatch
Re: File? What file? I don't remember saving any files!
With such tiny tapes I can only imagine that alignment was a real pain.
At least they had the good sense to only store one track on the tape rather than go with the idea of basing it on 8-track (or similar) recording format. If alignment with just one head is a problem, imagine how bad it would have been with multiple tracks/heads.
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 09:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
I had one of those
And the Logan book, which I studied quite carefully.
The memories... the first thing I did when I bought a game on cassette was to dump it on a microdrive. That meant I had the tape as a backup and could enjoy the faster load times. One of the things where I burned a lot of time back then was with multi load games that came on cassette. With some work you could make them load the parts from the cartridge. Games that were unplayable because of the long pauses for loading stages became a different, way better, experience.
I later repeated that trick with the diskette based Spectrum Plus made by Amstrad. Karnov was a fun game when the parts were quickly loaded from disk instead of from cassette, and I always wondered why they did not released a disk version in the first place. Games then were cheap enough to be affordable for a kid using pocket money, and at that point the challenge of breaking apart multi load games had lost its attractive. At the same time, my income increased enough to be willing to pay a bit more for a disk based game and save the hassle of disassembling and circumventing copy protections.
On reliability, I perhaps was lucky, I think I lost two or three cartridges during the entire lifetime of the system.
And I never had a chance to use the networking or RS232 interfaces, neither I know of anyone that did. Same with chaining more drive units, they were expensive enough to have just one, much less to even think of getting more.
Oh, the fond memories. Thanks, Reg.
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Wednesday 13th March 2013 10:12 GMT Khaptain
Re: there is no such thing as a novel idea / invention ,!
That's not realy true, someone , somewhere definately had an orignal thought/idea that ran through his brain. Whether or not the idea was made publically available or patented is another problem.
For example : I was considering the idea of capturing some pheasants ( Syrmaticus reevesii), attaching electrodes to their legs and trying to power up a smartphone for which an application has been written which helps the user to find new pheasants. A kind of reciprocal animal hunting application.
"Similar" ideas might exist but the chances of someone having the exact same idea are probably far smaller that 1 in 7 Billion...... there might be some attaching of electrodes to "fruit" alternatives but that is not my intended goal or idea.
I would definately consider this as being a novel idea and I am happy to take the credit for being the first person on this planet to think about it.....
Unlesss of course your ideas are very generic . ie - "I want to invent a computing device" which today would not be an original idea.
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