Double Sided Disk Drives & Original Compact 64K ROMs

[Mac128]

Question about DataSpace DS800 and HabaDisk double-sided drives. Where there others?

I can find very little about the DataSpace DS800. And nothing about the HabaDisk 800K. What I did find, this article from an 11/25/85 issue of InfoWorld, seems to imply that this double-sided 800K drive would work with the original Macintosh 64K ROMs prior to the release of the Mac Plus 128K ROMs. If that's so, did it need a driver installed in order to use them with the 64K ROMs? If so I would assume that they were not bootable drives. Or did they somehow use the built-in Sony drivers? If so, how did that work? Did the drive's firmware somehow trick the Mac into seeing the disk as two 400K disks, in the same manner as early hard drives did? If so, it should have worked with both the 128K & 512K (and further makes me scratch my head that Apple did not offer the UniDisk mechanism earlier as DS storage option for the 128K & 512K).

What I also find interesting about the DS800 article is that they acknowledge the forthcoming 128K ROM and it's compatibility, speculating that it should still be compatible. Interestingly, the one article I did find about the single-sided HabaDisk indicated that the 400K drive was broken by the 128K ROMs (which makes no sense at all). So I wonder if that was the case with the DS800, in any event I would imagine it would have required new drivers. Did the 800K HabaDisk maybe come out after the 128K ROMs?

 

[Dog Cow]

Here are some links to what I was able to find:

DiskBench3 Measurements - 20 Apr 1986 9:45 pm

Re: Information Request---Haba Systems' HabaDisk - 21 Dec 1984 5:04 pm

Double Sided/Single Sided disk drive information request - 24 Dec 1984 6:10 pm

Habadisk - 10 Jan 1985 11:03 pm

HabaDisk and the new systems... - 03 Jul 1986 12:11 pm

Looks like more questions than answers, but there is some useful info. One of the things about Usenet in the old days is that people were much more likely to mail responses to the poster rather than followup to the thread, meaning that we've got hundreds of threads asking a question, but the response(s) have been lost to the ages.