Mac+ OS floppy request

[Interceptor2]

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.

 

[cjtmacclassic]

I've got a few copies of 6.0.3, If it'll run on that system

 

[Dog Cow]

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.

 

[BarnacleGrim]

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).

 

[phreakout]

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)

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.

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).

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:

 

[Paralel]

This is why I stick to Macs that have a Superdrive in them, making disks is easy even on a brand new Windows system.

 

[Interceptor2]

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:

 

[Mac128]

This is why I stick to Macs that have a Superdrive in them, making disks is easy even on a brand new Windows system.

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.

 

[Paralel]

Meh.

 

[yuhong]

Do you know who designed the physical format for the 3.5 inch floppy used today, BTW?

It is the Microfloppy Industry Committee.

 

[yuhong]

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.

 

[Gorgonops]

...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.

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!

 

[Interceptor2]

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.

 

[Mac128]

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.

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.

 

[Gorgonops]

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.

Are you sure they hold a full 800K or 720K? The PC standard was 720K formatted.

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.

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.

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.)

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?

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

 

[Dog Cow]

[Disk ][ system was designed, as good off-the-shelf single-chip disk controllers didn't exist then

Insert the word "inexpensive" here. Things such as drive door detection, and track zero sensor were all eliminated to cut down on cost.

 

[tomlee59]

(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.)

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.

 

[Gorgonops]

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.

 

[Mac128]

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.