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From: wln@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (William L Nussbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: New Mac Frustrations
Message-ID: <1990Nov18.183937.13581@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Date: 18 Nov 90 18:39:37 GMT
References: <172342@<1990Nov9> <77800072@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (The Daily News)
Organization: Columbia University
Lines: 21

In article <77800072@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>Now that 3rd-party companies are selling 1.4Mb SCSI floppy drives
>cheaply ($250), the lack of the external floppy is not a great limitation.
>
>Frankly, I ask, why aren't *ALL* of apple's floppies SCSI by now?
>Then we wouldn't have these idiotic compatibility problems with 800K
>v.s. 1.4Mb floppy disk drives.  800K owners could just rip out the
>internal drive and stuff in a 1.4Mb drive.

There are only 7 SCSI addresses, between hard drives, backup systems, scanners,
Ethernet for the compact macs, etc.  Other companies can make the decision to
use up those addresses for floppy drives if the individual doesn't expect to
need them.  Apple can't - if it were standard, it would leave maybe 3-5 SCSI
addresses for those other devices.  I don't know whether SCSI II changes this,
and I don't know about the cost of supporting SCSI II in a floppy drive, but
it might be a possible later solution.  Then again, it might not...

  - Lee
| William Lee Nussbaum, Jr.
| wln@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu