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Article #181Re: Zip Demand - Mac vs PC?
From: John Nagle
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 1995 00:00
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 1995 00:00
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davidf@spotty.umsl.edu (David Findley) writes:
>Are you referring to the floppy drives costing 2x as much? Or the
>floppies themselves? Since the floppy disks are the same, I'll assume you
>mean the drive mechanism. Is this really an issue since all machines, PCs
>and Macs, (excepting some homebrew PCs and Mac subnotebooks) come with the
>requisite floppy drives.
Mac floppy drives are expensive for several reasons, the primary one
being the limited size of the market. But they're actually much more
complicated than PC drives; not only do they support two formats and
power eject, but they have a much higher level interface. For
historical reasons, PC floppy drives are really dumb, and the main CPU
does most of the work, including directly driving the stepping motor.
Still, if Mac clones were selling in volume, the parts would be cheap.
John Nagle
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X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f64bf,818ed7ee0068dde6 X-Google-Attributes: gidf64bf,public X-Google-Thread: 10cbb9,818ed7ee0068dde6 X-Google-Attributes: gid10cbb9,public X-Google-Thread: f4d7c,818ed7ee0068dde6 X-Google-Attributes: gidf4d7c,public X-Google-Thread: 10b5e3,818ed7ee0068dde6 X-Google-Attributes: gid10b5e3,public X-Google-Thread: 11002a,818ed7ee0068dde6 X-Google-Attributes: gid11002a,public From: nagle@netcom.com (John Nagle) Subject: Re: Zip Demand - Mac vs PC? Date: 1995/07/10 Message-ID: <nagleDBHBM0.46M@netcom.com> X-Deja-AN: 105901405 sender: nagle@netcom19.netcom.com references: <3tnd67$peb@newsbf02.news.aol.com> <3tnmhd$sj8@newsbf02.news.aol.com> <cc_foo-1007950138590001@dslip19.cc.utas.edu.au> <3tovmk$nm7@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> <davidf-0907951338080001@umslts1_10.umsl.edu> organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest) newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware.storage,comp.sys.mac.hardware,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage,comp.sys.mac.advocacy,aus.computers.mac