Epic Amiga battle on osnews.com Extra Floppy vs No Extra Floppy!

[Jiffy]

the number 1 upgrade for most people I knew was the 512Meg expansion

I must say i doubt that just a little. Even an 80 MB harddrive was big bucks back then, let alone a 512 MB ram expansion... :-P

I wasn't even aware a humble A500 could adress such a large area of ram. ;-)

Or do you mean 512 KB? Those were slightly more common compared to 512 MB... Oh well, KB, MB: who minds a factor of 1000 more or less.. :-)

[save2600]

he stated that where he is from most or all of people he knew with an Amiga did not have an external\second disk drive... please think about it, the necessity you mention was not always available in many parts of the world.

May not have been a necessity to some in the literal sense, but c'mon - a non-hard drive, single floppy system back then was a total compromise. Everyone I knew that couldn't afford an external drive at the time of purchase (including myself when I bought the A1000), that was the very first thing they saved up for. Well, that and some RAM.  

[Gilthanaz]

I had an A500 back then with 1MB and only the internal disk drive. Playing the Lucasfilm Adventures (Monkey I+II, Indy, ..) with that was very painful, and finally i saved up some money and bought a cheap external floppy. Waaaaaay better. Ever since i started using the external floppy, it was like a whole new world (especially since i could not afford a HDD)

I say pure win for *everything* is better than the single built-in drive. Kindwords spellcheck disk in the second drive.. made things easier. Not having to swap to disk 2 of Monkey Island 1 every time you opened a door (because the door sound was appearently on disk 2) - yay! Working with Basic and some example programs on a second floppy...

- G

[specialK]

definietly second disk drive was a God sent but just to explain myself and so our friends from the west can visualise, earnings and prices in eastern europe until maybe say early 1990's ?

Poland 1986, average monthly wage of a Polish worker was $26, prices of some of the imported goods you could purchase with USD, GBP or DM in specialty shops PEWEX;

so for eg when i finally saved up for my Atari 65XE in 1989, for the first year i had to borrow the casette player from a mate if i wanted to load games

[spaceman88]

While multi-disk games and copying were a lot better, the main reason I bought a second drive was to prevent the "Floppy Shuffle". That's where you would load Workbench and then try to run some program from Aminet or Fred Fish and you get "insert volume WB1.3" it whirrs for 1 second then "insert volume xxxxx" a second later "insert volume WB1.3" and this continues on for several minutes!! I've swapped disks maybe 20 times before the program will run. If you had a Hard Drive that would eliminate this problem, but an extra floppy was much cheaper in the 19080's.

[drHirudo]

I used Amiga 500 for around four years without external floppy drives and swapped like mad.

Then I got external floppy and I started replaying all the multidisk games of the past, again, because I loved playing with less swaps. Some games didn't support external drive, and insisted the disk to be entered in DF0: (Copy protection, lazy coding, coders not aware of possibility of extra drives and hardcoding everything to the internal floppy), but they were in the minority. The external drive made some games pretty much playable, which were unplayable with the internal floppy. For example King's Quest VI required more than 30 disk swaps to show you the intro screen.

The external floppy helped in productivity software and compilers as well.

I remember putting all header files of SAS_C that I used on single floppy which was on the external drive and I didn't need to swap disk to compile. Or I used external floppy with MOD files and I listened to them while programming.

The only minus of the external drive is that it allocated some memory. There are tricks to reduce the memory usage by lowering the buffers, but the best solution was to turn off the drive. The better external drive models had on/off switch on the back. It was useful for anti-clicking as well.

Currently I still use Amigas extensively, but I use external 1 TB hard drives.

[startup-sequence.bat]

I for one have read every post about this fascinating debate and I can't wait to learn about more minutia about external floppy disk drives

[Gilthanaz]

I for one have read every post about this fascinating debate and I can't wait to learn about more minutia about external floppy disk drives

I think you forgot your Text goes here tags

- G

[ppascal]

May not have been a necessity to some in the literal sense, but c'mon - a non-hard drive, single floppy system back then was a total compromise. Everyone I knew that couldn't afford an external drive at the time of purchase (including myself when I bought the A1000), that was the very first thing they saved up for. Well, that and some RAM.  

To put his words into perspective:

USA guys, please understand that in Poland where he (and I) lives/lived external floppy disk was as uncommon as floppy drive for small Atari. I owned Atari (my father saved for it over a year) from early 1990 till 1994 and I NEVER SAW ANYONE with floppy drive for it, me included. Not even in local "game clubs" where you could sit and pay for game time (that was my first computer experience, not counting reading local IT magazines). I NEVER SAW anyone with "big" atari (ST/Mega/...), which I dreamed of.

A500 was totally out of reach for like 99,9% households in the 80's, and for like 97% till 95. In highschool (93-97) I borrowed money from a bank to buy Sega Megadrive (12-months contract), and saved another month for my first cartridge from local shop, where I could swap it for another at 10% of full price -- it was the only way to afford games for me. When planning to buy Sega I calculated, that I could buy bare A500 if I was saving for 20 months. And I worked :-).

You probably can't imagine situation like this, but in Poland if you entered a "computer shop/computer club" any time till 94 (then our copyright law was stiffed), it was granted that on monitor you'll see X-COPY, laborously copying another disk for another kid for a relatively small fee. It was the only "software" other than games known to most of Amiga users :-). Couple dozens of dollars for a game was just impossible for us to afford -- in Poland you could live for that for a month :-).

To recap, I also never saw an Amiga with external floppy. And my cousine (also working student), happy Amiga 1200 owner could afford to buy his first accelerator (030/8MB) for Amiga in year 2000... PowerPCs and 060 we experienced mainly in magazine reading :-)).

That's what it looked like in developing countries from behind the "iron curtain".

[spaceman88]

I for one have read every post about this fascinating debate and I can't wait to learn about more minutia about external floppy disk drives

Great!! I'll send you a copy of my 589 page self published novel "My Life As A Floppy". You'll laugh, you'll cry, it will become part of you ;-).

[Duce]

I always found it was just a matter of what subsection of users you dealt with, but that's a pretty obvious observation.

In our loosely based computer users group back in the day, the guys into gaming were generally the guys with the A500's with no HD's and a bunch of extra floppy drives.

The guys I associated with mostly were big box Amiga owners (BBS dweebs) running single floppy systems with hard disks.  We were probably some of the very few people back in the day that never really gamed on our Miggy's.

Still remember getting my A3000 and being just staggered at the MASSIVE hard disk that came in it, which IIRC was a 40 MB drive, lol.  In the days where most people had never owned a HD equipped computer, that was just incredible to us.

[LoadWB]

Great!! I'll send you a copy of my 589 page self published novel "My Life As A Floppy". You'll laugh, you'll cry, it will become part of you ;-).

I'll take the unabridged edition, please.  Need something to hold down my copies of "The Decline of the Roman Empire" and "Encyclopaedia Galactica."

[orange]

I had A500 without external floppy. with 512Kb expansion, you'd get roughly same speed in Xcopy because, iirc, it cannot access both drives at same time.
most games we played were on one or 2 diskettes, except adventures. and those ext drives were expensive, just like any other Amiga peripheral.

[desiv]

To put his words into perspective:
USA guys, please understand that in Poland where he (and I) lives/lived external floppy disk was as uncommon as floppy drive for small Atari.

Not agreeing isn't the same as not understanding..  ;-)

No one said that nowhere in the world did most localized users not have a second floppy.

That being said, the Amiga wasn't a low end computer.
Even the A500 wasn't low end..  It cost some bucks...
I would think, even in Poland and elsewhere, a percentage of people who could afford that, would eventually be able to afford a second floppy...

I bought my first Amiga 500 back in the day, and couldn't afford the floppy.
Even as a USA guy.. ;-)
It was quite a while before I could afford a 2nd floppy.
I got really good at customizing my WB floppies and using the RAM drive.

But all the while, I was saving up for a second floppy, and eventually bought a cheap one...

I wouldn't be surprised if that type of action wasn't common among Amiga owners without a lot of money, regardless of where they lived.

And yes, I'm sure there were also people who couldn't afford even that...
Even in the USA..  

desiv

[Ral-Clan]

If the Amiga situation in Europe was the same as the C64 situation, I'll believe that external floppy drives were rare there.  In Europe the datasette remained the main data storage device for the C64 and external floppy drives were a lot more rare there --- in fact in Europe there were all sorts of fast loader devices/software for making datasette loading faster.  Here in Canada (and I assume the USA) most people dumped their datasettes when upgrading from the VIC-20 to a nice new C64 with 1541 drive.

[runequester]

A few Poles posting here so I am curious: I have heard mention from a friend who grew up in Chechoslovakia, that machines with 68K processors were not sold to the communist bloc, due to the power of the processor, and its suitability for military use. Any truth to that?

Could you get apple, atari or amiga machines before 91 from import shops? (assuming you had saved up of course)

If the Amiga situation in Europe was the same as the C64 situation, I'll believe that external floppy drives were rare there. In Europe the datasette remained the main data storage device for the C64 and external floppy drives were a lot more rare there --- in fact in Europe there were all sorts of fast loader devices/software for making datasette loading faster. Here in Canada (and I assume the USA) most people dumped their datasettes when upgrading from the VIC-20 to a nice new C64 with 1541 drive.

Europe is sort of a funny thing. What was typical in scandinavia wouldn't be typical in Italy etc.

At least from personal experience in Denmark, external floppies were quite common. Hard drives somewhat less so.