Re: Looking for Mac Plus System 6.0.8 diskettes

nospam wrote:
> you were burning cds in 1991??? with what burner?

Beats me, it was bought by a customer. Part of a package that consisted of
a 600meg maxtor drive (a special scsi unit that did not do periodic
recalibration which most drives did every 15 minutes) and software that
wrote an image to the maxtor disk and then copied it, sector by sector.

JVC sticks in my mind, but I may be wrong.

There were lots of problems with the setup including a limitation of
32k files (directories also counted as a file) per disk, which was about half
of what we needed. It also had the habit of writing a sector of zeros when
it felt like it, without any error messages.

Anticipating your question, we used CD-ROMs delivered in 6 disk changers,
which replaced towers of hard drives, containing 350,000 images per document.

Eventually we did get a Yamaha 4x burner, and the vendor of the original one
offered a ROM update to make it into a standard burner, but we decided against
it.

> i remember the original yamaha 1x burner in 1995, back when cd blanks
> were $20 *each*. it was expensive (i vaguely recall $2000-ish) but it
> was much cheaper and smaller than the commercial burners that preceded
> it. the burn software was amazingly shitty and it would occasionally
> crash, leaving you with a $20 coaster. it was about 1996 when astarte
> toast appeared, which was *much* better. later, adaptec bought it and
> subsequently spun it off to roxio.

We were paying $10 a blank and had a routine failure rate of 10% (one per
box). We probably got that price because we burned hundreds of them.

In December 1991/January 1992 I produced a CD-ROM for them with searchable
abstracts of articles about their products. It had links to full images of
the articles, and a custom program I wrote to display them on a PC and print
them on an HP laserjet printer.

It was so long ago that most people were not even using Windows.

The final CD I burned was sent to the pressing plant, which saved us a
$500 mastering charge. We were able to get 500 disks pressed and packed
in jewel boxes for less than that. :-)

Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM

nospam wrote:
> there was an app that could do that on a pc, and i think it's called
> rawrite, but it's been well over 15 years since i've even seen a floppy
> disc in use and i don't remember the specifics on how to make mac
> floppy discs on a pc.
>
> the only issue is that the mac plus has 800k drives and pcs have 1.4m
> drives, so even that might not work.

AFAIK, Mac floppies spin faster (for more density) in the outer tracks,
and PC drives cannot do that. Hardware limitation, software won't help.

--
Wes Groleau

Teacher Tip: Personalize Exercises
http://Ideas.Lang-Learn.us/russell?itemid=1474

Wes Groleau wrote:

> AFAIK, Mac floppies spin faster (for more density) in the outer tracks,
> and PC drives cannot do that. Hardware limitation, software won't help.

If you could shorten the size of the bits (control the recording
frequency) you could do it. A long time ago (I gave it away itin 1996) I
had a COPY II board for a PC, that was designed to copy copy protected
disks on a PC. It went between the floppy controler and the drive and
allowed you to read and write Mac 800k (or 400k) floppies.

It's also more complicated because Apple disks were written with GCR encoding,
as opposed to IBM's MFM.

I've seen a program to read floppies for old computers on a PC that can
be used with a special cable that connects the data lead from the drive
to the parallel port on the PC.

Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of it, if it will write floppies
and if it works with Mac ones at all. :-(

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM