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

[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.

[Zac67]

BS - I bought an external drive way before the 512 KB upgrade. Later, I connected it to my then new A3000 - 2 drives were pretty much standard.

[orange]

I'd say 512K expansion is much more useful to A500..
anyway this is one of those st00pid internet flaming discussions.
it doesn't really matter if those floppies were common or not.

[mechy]

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 ;-).

HAHAHA good one... oh and put me in for a copy too :roflmao:

Mech

[Nostalgiac]

When I got my A2000 way back then, I got a 2nd internal drive with it. Later on I got a harddisk, kept the 2nd floppy. Again later I got an external HD floppy, and sold the 2nd internal one.

I still have that ext. HD one.

Tom UK

[smerf]

There is an epic (well okay, for the few, the proud, the Amigans...) battle going on over at OSNews.com in a news item about Icaros.  I thought it was funny.

Basically one person is arguing that external floppy drives were extremely common, and very useful because a lot of games were multiple disks, and disk swapping was a pain.

The other person says that external floppy drives were too expensive and that there weren't really that many multi-floppy games, and even if there were, they weren't very popular!

So far there really has only been one other person who has piped in that said external floppy drives were pretty common.

Join in the battle!  http://www.osnews.com/comments/26095

Really, I remember back in the day, my brother had bought the A500 off of a friend of his, and he had an external floppy drive, as did my friend and his older brother (which by the way, at one point his older brother decided it'd be a good idea to try out the null modem connection to play stunt car racer, and he connected the parallel port to the serial port, causing smoke to rise up from my friend's A500... well he got the fatter agnus upgrade for free out of it (well if memory serves me correctly)).

The external floppy drive my brother had ended up dying on him, so I'm going to side with the "they were common, but they're rare now because of high failure rate."

slaapliedje

Hi,

Don't know about your groups, but everybody in my group had four 3.5 floppy drives and at least one 5.25 drive. Later we all bought 5-10 meg hard drives, that's right you young whipper snappers I said megabyte, not gigabyte hard drives. Paid about $100 a megabyte too!!! (ok a little less I paid $495, but there was shipping charges and insurance don't forget).

smerf

[Frags]

Yeah my first hd was 20Mb - only a bit bigger than the cache in my CPU today!

[specialK]

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)

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.

 How are ya mate?
  As far as I know and remember, yes there was an embargo on many items in order to stop them being sold to the eastern block countries.
  I can only speak for myself and from what I remember and experienced when living in those times. Possibly other members from larger cities such as Warsaw and Krakow can share their memories?
  The local Pewex shop in my town only had Atari 8bit computers, very limited selection, 65XE and XC12 and some Joysticks.
  During the time from 1987 to about 1990 I have never seen any other computer on sale in this shop. There were no Atari ST’s, no Amigas and no Apple computers.
  Please note that even in Poland depending on geographical location there were significant divisions in what computers majority of people owned or wanted to own.  I lived in south west of Poland and for the life of me I cant remember anyone owning a C64, everyone I knew and all the citizen clubs (Miejski Osrodek Kultury) had Atari XL\XE’s.  
  From a circle of about 20 to 25 people I knew who did own Atari XL\XE only 3 owned Disk Drives and that’s including the citizens club and the two guys who had families in USA
  This is then very interesting because once the Amiga vs ST era approached and the wealthier (aka. Family abroad) friends who owned Atari 8bits begun to get their new shiny…Amigas!   That’s right, most guys I was friends with and swapped Atari 8bit games with chose the Amiga rather than Atari ST!
  All of the mates who did get their Amiga 500’s (imported via grey market from  West Germany) never had the second disk drive.

[runequester]

Thanks for the information, much appreciated

[Dan]

Here in Sweden the common setup was A500, 1 MB chip and one external floppy.
The guy with two or three external drives, 2MB chip expansion and the homemade pause button connected to the pins of the 68000 was king of the schoolyard and of XCopy
The only one without external floppy I knew was the retard with Saddam virus on his XCopy, who stored his floppy on top of his tv, nobody wanted to swap games with that guy.
Harddrives and other serious hardware upgrades was only used by people who did professional stuff like animation.

[scuzzb494]

Although I used the hard drive for most things, back then storage was expensive. My 350MB hard drive cost me £350. So when I invested in an XL Drive 1.76MB I pretty much stopped using the inbuilt floppy drive of the A1200. Was a touch slow but did the job. First thing I do with an Amiga is plug in an XL Drive. Always pleased when I find one when collecting.

http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/a_scuzz_sept20/a_scuzz_sep20_377.jpg

http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/a_scuzz_may04/a_may04_026.jpg

Also when you ran games like Sensi, before the HD install, you would stick both disks in, one in the internal and one in the external and they would happily disk swap between the drives. One problem I did have occasionally with the VidiAmiga set up was if I had it plugged in it disabled the drive at times. Never did get to the bottom of it.

The XL Drive was great with CrossDOS also for transferring stuff from the PC.

[pwermonger]

I have a feeling anyone argueing that people with Amigas didnt buy a second floppy because they were very expensive, is probably mistaking the Amiga for the earlier 8Bit machines. For those, a second drive was expensive, sometimes the drives being more expensive than the computer. But Amiga floppies were cheap by comparison. I know my first purchase for my 500 was the 512k expansion, then after a couple of weeks floppy swapping to load games, a second floppy drive. Even the people I knew with 1000s had second floppy drives. They were far cheaper than hard drives or further RAM expansions. I didnt get a hard drive until I got my 2000HD but continued to use that floppy drive even with the 2000.

[cicero790]

I had 2 external drives stacked above the internal one on the A500. Remember being not completely content about the tilted and more compact design of the A1200 that forced a more loosely placement of the drives beside the A1200, which in turn took up more space than the bigger A500. On the other hand, I like the A1200 design more than the A500,  so it was a mixed bag of annoyance and contentness. I did use all 3 drives extensively.

[runequester]

Im curious. For a 1 meg machine, does 2 external drives cause any trouble running software?

I remember the manual for my floppy drive warning about memory use when you have multiple drives, but I never really thought about it, and I only had one in any event.

[cicero790]

It was a long time since I thought about that, but I think there were some programs that didn’t want to buy 3 floppy’s and you had to turn some of them of. I did have a hard disk and memory expansion for the A500 and it was the widest computer I ever owned.  How sad to sell it back in the early nineties, but the A1200 is still here.

[Gazbonk]

I had an A500 with 1.3 Roms, 1 meg chip ram, ICD AdRam 540 with 4 meg Ram & AdRam 560 2 meg = 6.5 meg, three external floppy drives.

Was great for running loads of disks on workbench, great for multiple disk games  and excellent for multi disk demos, this was well before CD drives and the internet as we know it,

Did also have a hayes 2400 modem which I used to go on the bulletin board at Black Dog Towers in London uk (PD disk for bulletin boards), I dont think there were any internet browsers for the A500 at the time.

Wish I never sold that old A500 cost me a small fortune.