The long-rumoured explanations went something along the lines of Amstrad getting them from a bankruptcy auction and/or salvaging them from a scrapheap after another computer manufacturer abandoned their project when it became clear that 3.5" had become the de facto standard.
Neither of those really made much sense - the choice would have been made about a year before 3.5" became unstoppable, and if there'd been a big computer manufacturer bankruptcy then why not sell off the whole computers rather than just the disk drives?
RP's explanation still hangs on Amstrad's reputation for being cheap'n'cheerful (reusing the ubiquitous 5.25" controllers & drivers definitely will have brought the cost down) but rings a lot more true than those other stories.
I was a 8512 owner so had the fancy-pants DSDD variant as my B: drive. The disks were great - not just more robust than 3.5", but the Amsoft-branded ones came with a jewel case with standardised inlay and labels. Even the soft slip cases you got with the Maxell ones were pretty useful!
This is something I've done a lot of research on and getting timelines ironed out. Sony did sell the 3.5in Micro Floppy Disk drive before Matsushita and Hitachi were able to get the 3in Compact Floppy Disk on the market, but only by months, not years. The Amdek Amdisk III was being shown in 1982 [1] using 3in CFD drives. It was being reviewed by publications in 1983 [2]. The drives were on the market before Amstrad used them and were very seriously contending with Sony [3].
The Sony MFD had more industry support than the CFD, but it didn't hit critical mass until the Macintosh released in 1984. Every single machine before that using Sony MFDs failed to widely compete because the drives and disks were still too uncommon, aside from HP who had a closed ecosystem. Some (Jonos Escort, CDI DOT) even attempted to re-released with 5.25in drives to save the base computer design. In 1984 there were still new [4] small floppy formats being introduced, it absolutely made sense to still try to use CFD. I would say especially for a lower end market aimed at children CFDs would be better as they are more robust.
Acorn started using 3.5” drives in 1984 with the Electron Plus 3 (and later the Master Compact in 1986 and Archimedes in 1988, possibly some earlier peripherals that I don’t remember).
AFAIK Acorn used a constant angular speed format (as did PCs when they started using 3.5” drives) and the same controller chips as for 5.25” drives. I thought the variable speed thing that Roland Perry talks about was proprietary to Apple, not a general requirement of the Sony drives.
> AFAIK Acorn used a constant angular speed format (as did PCs when they started using 3.5” drives) and the same controller chips as for 5.25” drives. I thought the variable speed thing that Roland Perry talks about was proprietary to Apple, not a general requirement of the Sony drives.
Is that why a Mac DD floppy could store 800k, while the PC DD floppy could only store 720k?
I had the Amstrad version of the speccy (+3) (I had a few different speccies over the years all the way back to the rubber keyed one) that took the 3" disks, it overlapped with getting a PC so the writing was already on that particular wall.
The disks worked great, I don't recall one ever failing in use (unlike the 3.5" on the PC), it was night and day compared to faffing with tapes at least.
They where in my opinion the best spectrum made and while Amstrad may have a reputation for cheaping out they were (from what I remember it has been a long time) no worse than the previous speccies (and better than the early ones).
I remember that when my father took me to get a computer and there were 2 CPC464 versions, one with the tape and the other with the 3" disk, I thought that tapes are something there for years and that is what I'm getting.
Truth be told, I was just 7 at the time so it was just a choice based on that I was more familiar with audio tapes :)
According to Wikipedia, 3-inch disks were not only used in Amstrad and Sinclair home computers, but also by the smaller British home computer makers Oric and Tatung, as well as Sega and Yamaha. However there are no details about which Sega and Yamaha models those might be...
It's interesting to hear Tatung described as "British", but for their computers that's an accurate description. I know the same 'Tatung' from their iconic Taiwanese electric steamer[0]. While Tatung is a Taiwanese company, their British research lab designed the Tatung Einstein TC-01 home computer with a 3" Hitachi floppy drive.
I highly recommend this newsletter on the Tatung electric steamer. Likely worthy of its own HN post.
The Oric Microdisc was a rare peripheral, rather than being built into a computer like with the Amstrads.
It was originally promised for the Oric-1 (with no details about what form it would take) but details were initially vague, with it being announced as a 3" drive only around the time of the release of the follow-up model (the Oric Atmos). It finally arrived on sale around a year after the Atmos, only a few months before Tangerine went out of business. I can't imagine many were actually sold in the UK, though some probably turned up in France where the Atmos was a bit more successful.
My first computer was an Amstrad 8256 (also known as the Joyce). It came with a 3" drive. They worked ok but were expensive. After a while I installed a standard 3.5 " drive in the second drive slot. Besides being cheaper and much easier to obtain, they also had twice the capacity, as I recall. Over time I also installed a modem and replaced the 8 bit dot matrix printer with a 16 bit one.
Do you mean replacing the 9-pin dot matrix printer with a 24-pin one? 9 pins allowed printing a line of text with ascenders and descenders in one pass.
The 9 pin printer on the 8256/8512 was a great example of the Amstrad approach.
Mechanically, it was pretty good - albeit a bit slow and noisy. But it didn't have its own power supply or controller, so instead used the host computer for both. This cut costs, and enabled the PCW to do without proper serial or parallel ports which was yet another way that Amstrad managed to save money.
The upshot of driving the printer directly was that you could get full control over the stepper motor, allowing it to be used in a '1 pin' mode which produced a single row of pixels at a time giving a much higher effective resolution. Some DTP packages like Microdesign II used this to good effect - I recall the results looking better than an Epson 24 pin, at the cost of taking something like 30 mins to print a single page!
So much nostalgia. The CPC6128 was my first computer back in the mid 80s so I’ve got a lot of love for it - including these discs. The little tab switch on the top I could stuff with paper if I wanted to make an unwritable system disc into something I could use to store that game my cousin had.
They came back to nz from a trip in the uk with a load of games on tape and we didn’t have a tape machine. As a workaround I pulled my sisters ghetto blaster and the amstrad apart so I could hot-wire the two together so I could play Gryzor (Contra). Doesn’t get much more 80s than that.
I had a 6128. It was pretty great, booting straight to the BASIC prompt, but it wasn't too hard to load programs either. I used to get the bus to town to grab my copy of Amstrad Action with a tape on the front every month and excitedly try and get the games to load off a cheap tape player. I can still hear those loading noises - oooo eeeee shshshshshshshshsh
He's referring to the Shugart bus, which was used for almost all floppy disk drives (Apple and Commodore being the great exceptions), regardless of format. That absolutely spoke not against 3.5" floppies, which Sony released quite a number of years earlier.
Funny that he leaves out Atari, which managed to release in spring of '85 a system with 3.5" FDD to a comparable price.
Don't know why he felt the need to justify their decision 40 years later and then still just emit phrases from marketing.
Back then the idea of using disks for one computer on another wasn't really popular. It was possible in some cases but there were gotchas. Perhaps Amstrad wanted to lock people in to their own disks, which they sold, and save money to boot. Something like the modern printer cartridge scam.
I remember having these disks on the Tatung Einstein [1] too! An extremely niche machine, but a powerful one that was often used to develop games before porting them to smaller systems.
I love the first response, which says that anyone who is interested in computers should know the reason why they chose 3" floppies.
I think, by definition, anybody who is arguing about 3.5" and 3" floppies in 2021 probably knows a fair bit more about computers than the average person. But everything is relative, huh?
Yeah I know a lot about computers and I was very active in those days and I had no idea 3" floppies existed. I've never seen them in a shop, at a computer show or club or anything else.
Another cost-saving measure: 3.5" floppies couldn't be flipped, so needed heads on both sides. Actually (TIL!) the first Macs had single-sided 3.5" drives, which wasted half the capacity of the disk (not sure if there were single-sided disks too?).
And speaking of Matsushita setting up a dedicated production line for the 3-inch floppy drives, they will have done the same for the dedicated 2-inch floppy drives production line 5 years later:
The long-rumoured explanations went something along the lines of Amstrad getting them from a bankruptcy auction and/or salvaging them from a scrapheap after another computer manufacturer abandoned their project when it became clear that 3.5" had become the de facto standard.
Neither of those really made much sense - the choice would have been made about a year before 3.5" became unstoppable, and if there'd been a big computer manufacturer bankruptcy then why not sell off the whole computers rather than just the disk drives?
RP's explanation still hangs on Amstrad's reputation for being cheap'n'cheerful (reusing the ubiquitous 5.25" controllers & drivers definitely will have brought the cost down) but rings a lot more true than those other stories.
I was a 8512 owner so had the fancy-pants DSDD variant as my B: drive. The disks were great - not just more robust than 3.5", but the Amsoft-branded ones came with a jewel case with standardised inlay and labels. Even the soft slip cases you got with the Maxell ones were pretty useful!
This is something I've done a lot of research on and getting timelines ironed out. Sony did sell the 3.5in Micro Floppy Disk drive before Matsushita and Hitachi were able to get the 3in Compact Floppy Disk on the market, but only by months, not years. The Amdek Amdisk III was being shown in 1982 [1] using 3in CFD drives. It was being reviewed by publications in 1983 [2]. The drives were on the market before Amstrad used them and were very seriously contending with Sony [3].
The Sony MFD had more industry support than the CFD, but it didn't hit critical mass until the Macintosh released in 1984. Every single machine before that using Sony MFDs failed to widely compete because the drives and disks were still too uncommon, aside from HP who had a closed ecosystem. Some (Jonos Escort, CDI DOT) even attempted to re-released with 5.25in drives to save the base computer design. In 1984 there were still new [4] small floppy formats being introduced, it absolutely made sense to still try to use CFD. I would say especially for a lower end market aimed at children CFDs would be better as they are more robust.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=ia91vNwYgLIC&pg=PA24&dq=mi...
[2] https://books.google.com/books?id=ui8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA75&dq=am...
[3] https://archive.org/details/ComputersElectronics1982-11/page...
[4] https://books.google.com/books?id=lC4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...
Acorn started using 3.5” drives in 1984 with the Electron Plus 3 (and later the Master Compact in 1986 and Archimedes in 1988, possibly some earlier peripherals that I don’t remember).
AFAIK Acorn used a constant angular speed format (as did PCs when they started using 3.5” drives) and the same controller chips as for 5.25” drives. I thought the variable speed thing that Roland Perry talks about was proprietary to Apple, not a general requirement of the Sony drives.
> AFAIK Acorn used a constant angular speed format (as did PCs when they started using 3.5” drives) and the same controller chips as for 5.25” drives. I thought the variable speed thing that Roland Perry talks about was proprietary to Apple, not a general requirement of the Sony drives.
Is that why a Mac DD floppy could store 800k, while the PC DD floppy could only store 720k?
No, that’s more to do with details of the format (sectors per track etc): Acorn DD 3.5” floppies could also store 800 KB.
I had the Amstrad version of the speccy (+3) (I had a few different speccies over the years all the way back to the rubber keyed one) that took the 3" disks, it overlapped with getting a PC so the writing was already on that particular wall.
The disks worked great, I don't recall one ever failing in use (unlike the 3.5" on the PC), it was night and day compared to faffing with tapes at least.
They where in my opinion the best spectrum made and while Amstrad may have a reputation for cheaping out they were (from what I remember it has been a long time) no worse than the previous speccies (and better than the early ones).
There are some interesting hobby projects to add IDE drives and internet access https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA_YpQ9suJ8
I remember that when my father took me to get a computer and there were 2 CPC464 versions, one with the tape and the other with the 3" disk, I thought that tapes are something there for years and that is what I'm getting. Truth be told, I was just 7 at the time so it was just a choice based on that I was more familiar with audio tapes :)
The disk version was the CPC 664
Tapes were a lot easier to copy!
664s are rare (the 6128 came out a few months later and torpedoed its sales) and quite sought-after today.
According to Wikipedia, 3-inch disks were not only used in Amstrad and Sinclair home computers, but also by the smaller British home computer makers Oric and Tatung, as well as Sega and Yamaha. However there are no details about which Sega and Yamaha models those might be...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#3-inch_%2...
It's interesting to hear Tatung described as "British", but for their computers that's an accurate description. I know the same 'Tatung' from their iconic Taiwanese electric steamer[0]. While Tatung is a Taiwanese company, their British research lab designed the Tatung Einstein TC-01 home computer with a 3" Hitachi floppy drive.
I highly recommend this newsletter on the Tatung electric steamer. Likely worthy of its own HN post.
0: https://newsletter.yunhai.shop/p/-taiwan-and-its-steam-cooke...
The Oric Microdisc was a rare peripheral, rather than being built into a computer like with the Amstrads.
It was originally promised for the Oric-1 (with no details about what form it would take) but details were initially vague, with it being announced as a 3" drive only around the time of the release of the follow-up model (the Oric Atmos). It finally arrived on sale around a year after the Atmos, only a few months before Tangerine went out of business. I can't imagine many were actually sold in the UK, though some probably turned up in France where the Atmos was a bit more successful.
There's a bit of info at https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/31261/Oric-Microdisc... so it definitely did exist (unlike several other peripherals promised by Tangerine over the years!)
The Sega model is seemingly the “Super Control Station SF-7000”, an add on for the SC-3000 computer.
I think some of the early Roland rack mount samplers had 3" Quikdisk drives too.
S-220 maybe. By the time of the S550 they'd switched to 3.5" like everyone else.
QuickDiscs are 2.8”, different drives and media from 3”. I vaguely remember that they’re just data dumps as well, not random access devices.
Yes, S-220 has Quickdisk. S-10 (keyboard version) has it also.
My first computer was an Amstrad 8256 (also known as the Joyce). It came with a 3" drive. They worked ok but were expensive. After a while I installed a standard 3.5 " drive in the second drive slot. Besides being cheaper and much easier to obtain, they also had twice the capacity, as I recall. Over time I also installed a modem and replaced the 8 bit dot matrix printer with a 16 bit one.
Do you mean replacing the 9-pin dot matrix printer with a 24-pin one? 9 pins allowed printing a line of text with ascenders and descenders in one pass.
Oh you're right, the original was 9 pin and the new one was 24. The new one made beautiful text, and besides that was much faster.
The 9 pin printer on the 8256/8512 was a great example of the Amstrad approach.
Mechanically, it was pretty good - albeit a bit slow and noisy. But it didn't have its own power supply or controller, so instead used the host computer for both. This cut costs, and enabled the PCW to do without proper serial or parallel ports which was yet another way that Amstrad managed to save money.
The upshot of driving the printer directly was that you could get full control over the stepper motor, allowing it to be used in a '1 pin' mode which produced a single row of pixels at a time giving a much higher effective resolution. Some DTP packages like Microdesign II used this to good effect - I recall the results looking better than an Epson 24 pin, at the cost of taking something like 30 mins to print a single page!
So much nostalgia. The CPC6128 was my first computer back in the mid 80s so I’ve got a lot of love for it - including these discs. The little tab switch on the top I could stuff with paper if I wanted to make an unwritable system disc into something I could use to store that game my cousin had.
They came back to nz from a trip in the uk with a load of games on tape and we didn’t have a tape machine. As a workaround I pulled my sisters ghetto blaster and the amstrad apart so I could hot-wire the two together so I could play Gryzor (Contra). Doesn’t get much more 80s than that.
I had a 6128. It was pretty great, booting straight to the BASIC prompt, but it wasn't too hard to load programs either. I used to get the bus to town to grab my copy of Amstrad Action with a tape on the front every month and excitedly try and get the games to load off a cheap tape player. I can still hear those loading noises - oooo eeeee shshshshshshshshsh
Had a pcw8256 . Learned z80 assembly and cp/m. Added line drawing and pixel plotting to locomotive basic. Fun times :)
I lived in a small costal town with a harbour and a lot of fishing boats.
The only other place I ever saw 3" floppies was for plotters on the fishing boats.
That meant that I could source discs locally at a fairly reasonable price (compared to mail order).
Still expensive so I pined for the Vortex 5 1/4" drives[1] with much cheaper really floppy discs.
Still a 6128 die-hard. I had C64 friends but I am to this day not sure they were real friends :-)
[1] https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Vortex_Disc_Drives
He's referring to the Shugart bus, which was used for almost all floppy disk drives (Apple and Commodore being the great exceptions), regardless of format. That absolutely spoke not against 3.5" floppies, which Sony released quite a number of years earlier.
Funny that he leaves out Atari, which managed to release in spring of '85 a system with 3.5" FDD to a comparable price.
Don't know why he felt the need to justify their decision 40 years later and then still just emit phrases from marketing.
Back then the idea of using disks for one computer on another wasn't really popular. It was possible in some cases but there were gotchas. Perhaps Amstrad wanted to lock people in to their own disks, which they sold, and save money to boot. Something like the modern printer cartridge scam.
I remember having these disks on the Tatung Einstein [1] too! An extremely niche machine, but a powerful one that was often used to develop games before porting them to smaller systems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatung_Einstein
I love the first response, which says that anyone who is interested in computers should know the reason why they chose 3" floppies.
I think, by definition, anybody who is arguing about 3.5" and 3" floppies in 2021 probably knows a fair bit more about computers than the average person. But everything is relative, huh?
Yeah I know a lot about computers and I was very active in those days and I had no idea 3" floppies existed. I've never seen them in a shop, at a computer show or club or anything else.
Owned a CPC464. Loved the discs compare to C64 ones, hated the price.
Huh I had no idea these ever existed. And I was very active in those days. But Amstrad wasn't big where I lived.
I'm glad all the others chose 3.5".
I remember flipping these disks manually in my CPC drive, to use both sides.
Another cost-saving measure: 3.5" floppies couldn't be flipped, so needed heads on both sides. Actually (TIL!) the first Macs had single-sided 3.5" drives, which wasted half the capacity of the disk (not sure if there were single-sided disks too?).
Thx. Didn't know until now that 3" floppies even existed
And speaking of Matsushita setting up a dedicated production line for the 3-inch floppy drives, they will have done the same for the dedicated 2-inch floppy drives production line 5 years later:
https://youtu.be/YhKWMHN4m0U?t=67
A bunch of different companies built drives around that site, it was before the three and a half inch became standard.
I don't recall who made them, but I recall a three and a quarter floppy. Or maybe my memory's wrong?