Typhoon 2.8 MB floppy drive

[bigmessowires]

Has anyone ever heard of the Typhoon floppy drive? I ran across several references to it recently while reading SWIM and New Age floppy controller documentation, and looking at the floppy drive source code from 68K Linux. Apparently it's a 2.8 MB ultra-high capacity floppy drive that made it pretty far into planning stages, but as far as I can tell it was never actually released. I think there may actually be support for it in some Apple ROMs, or at least in 68K Linux.

The only other reference to Typhoon that I could find was in this list of Apple project names: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_codenames

 

[Gorgonops]

2.88MB floppy drives, IE "ED" drives, did exist in the PC world. Presumably Apple was considering making a Mac version of it. They're really rare in the wild, however. Late model IBM PS/2s shipped with the drives and the floppy controllers in most PCs made in the second half of the 1990s technically support them, but almost nobody had one. (There was an adoption issue with them because most PCs in circulation when they were introduced would have required a new floppy controller to drive them, unlike the 1.44MB which ran at the same data rate as the old 1.2MB high density floppy in the PC/AT. Most AT class machines had the floppy controller on the same board as the hard disk controller *and* there was the issue of BIOS support so the standard pretty much bellyflopped. By the time generic PCs had the requisite floppy controller and BIOS support the world already had things like ZIP drives.) I can understand Apple just saying "forget it" given the reception they had in the PC world, since pretty much the only reason 1990's Macs had floppy drives was to exchange data with PCs.

 

[finkmac]

Don't forget NeXT computers… On all NeXTstations (and NeXTcubes with internal floppy drive), the drive is a Extended Density 2.88MB floppy drive.

The one in 'stations and 'cubes supports reading NeXT, Mac, and DOS formats. From what I understand, most NeXT software came on ED floppies…

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Don't forget NeXT computers… On all NeXTstations (and NeXTcubes with internal floppy drive), the drive is a Extended Density 2.88MB floppy drive.The one in 'stations and 'cubes supports reading NeXT, Mac, and DOS formats. From what I understand, most NeXT software came on ED floppies…

I can confirm from direct testing that a NeXTstation will read and write 2.8 MB floppy disks in NeXT format only. It is impossible to format a 2.8 MB disk in HFS (since there is no Mac-compatible 2.8 MB drive,) and NeXTstep does not read, write, or format FAT12 (DOS) at 2.8 MB. It can read and write 1.4 MB FAT12 disks just fine, though.

Neither can a PC with a 2.8 MB drive read or write a NeXT-formatted 2.8 MB disk. (I have a couple PS/2s with 2.8 MB drives, plus the NeXTstation, and a few 2.8 MB 'ED' disks.)

If you have a PS/2, though, you can have fun with the old DOS program 2M, which can format an ED disk to fit just shy of 4 MB...

 

[uniserver]

Wow, 2.88m this standard completely missed me somehow.

its a shame too because i think it would have been great to have that extra storage in my floppy swappin days.

Hey quick question. What is the actual formatted space? With a disk that is freshly formatted 2.88m ?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

It is 2,931,712 bytes (2880 KB) in MS-DOS. NeXTstep only shows "2880k". (I don't know of a lower-level utility that shows actual capacity in NeXT.)

Essentially exactly double the formatted capacity of a conventional 1.4 MB "HD" floppy disk.

The big problem is that it wasn't enough more than 1.4 MB to be worth the extra cost. By that point you had files that either fit on an HD floppy just fine, or needed far more than the ED disk gave you.

And the Zip drive and Magneto-Optical drives, and LS-120 drive all came out just a couple years later, before ED disks had gotten any more foot hold than IBM and NeXT, effectively killing it as a "new standard". (Although to this day, any motherboard that has a floppy port is nearly guaranteed to support 2.88 MB drives. Just as most server motherboards with an IDE port support LS-120 drives as a boot device.)

 

[CelGen]

I can confirm from direct testing that a NeXTstation will read and write 2.8 MB floppy disks in NeXT format only. It is impossible to format a 2.8 MB disk in HFS (since there is no Mac-compatible 2.8 MB drive,) and NeXTstep does not read, write, or format FAT12 (DOS) at 2.8 MB. It can read and write 1.4 MB FAT12 disks just fine, though.

Huh. I could of sworn 3.3 had no problem reading 2.88's formatted on a PC and vice-versa.

PLI sold a SCSI 2.88mb floppy drive. From 2004-2007 they seemed to pop on ebay pretty often fro $50-$75. I have not seen those prices in a long, long time though.

 

[bigmessowires]

Interesting. I was aware of the LS-120 and of course Zip disks, but somehow I completely missed the boat on 2.88 MB floppies. Too bad they never caught on.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

If you really want fun, the LS-120's successor LS-240 drive was great. In addition to having native 240MB disks, it could write 32 MB to a standard HD floppy. However, this process was more like burning a CD-R than writing to a regular floppy - you had to format the disk to its special 32 MB format, then write all the data at once. Any LS-240 drive could read these 32 MB disks (but nothing else could,) but to write to it again, you had to reformat and re-write everything again.

 

[bigmessowires]

Wow, that's crazy. I wonder how that worked, putting about 20x more data on an HD floppy than it was designed to hold? I thought the capacity had something to do with the minimum size of the magnetic domains on the floppy media - basically if you tried to make the bits on the disk too small, the sections that were magnetized one way would blur into their neighbors magnetized the other way or something - with the limit determined by the properties of the media, not the drive itself.

 

[Paralel]

I think it used laser tracking, rather than magnetic tracking, so it could make smaller tracks, and thus more of them on a disk, that were still within the tolerances of the media. However, I wouldn't expect any type of long-term data storage.

 

[NJRoadfan]

The Floptical drive did laser tracking and stored 21MB on a disk, but those required special blanks.

 

[olePigeon]

I had a SCSI floptical drive for a brief time, but I sold it to a fellow member. Never got to play with the floptical discs because I couldn't find any. Was certainly neat having a floppy drive connected over SCSI, though.

 

[CelGen]

SGI for a period sold floptical drives as an option for their systems. One model even used a SCSI bridge.

The disks were horribly expensive (even 2.88 disks are cheaper on ebay) and both drives I owned didn't work. I actually blew my bridge board up because its pin orientation is reversed.

 

[yuhong]

IMO it should have been released with the first Macs that required System 7, as it was much bigger than System 6.

 

[uniserver]

LS-240 drive was great. In addition to having native 240MB disks, it could write 32 MB to a standard HD floppy.

i think that is awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i want one!

was this device scsi?

I remember when this first came out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)

just not compatible with machines not running the TSR.

 

[Gorgonops]

I remember when this first came out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)just not compatible with machines not running the TSR.

Actually I'd swear that disks formatted with those programs were readable on a machine without the TSR, but I think it might depend on exactly what technique you used. Microsoft and IBM both used magic on some of their installation disks to cram more data: Office 97 install disks crammed 1,680k of data on each floppy, while OS/2 crammed even more, 1,840kb on their install floppies. The Microsoft floppies were "DOS compatible" because the standard floppy driver was able to handle the disk geometry read from the disk and work with it while the OS/2 ones were completely alien so far as DOS was concerned without a TSR.

The disks from "fdformat" were essentially the same as the Microsoft disks, I suspect that was the program I remember playing with.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

LS-240 drive was great. In addition to having native 240MB disks, it could write 32 MB to a standard HD floppy.

i think that is awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i want one!

was this device scsi?

Most of them were IDE. (Or, to be pedantic, ATAPI.)