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From: alford@ecsvax.UUCP (Ross Alford)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: Reading Apple II disks
Message-ID: <985@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 8-Apr-85 18:59:32 EST
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.985
Posted: Mon Apr  8 18:59:32 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 10-Apr-85 06:16:31 EST
References: <1535@decwrl.UUCP>
Reply-To: alford@ecsvax.UUCP (Ross Alford)
Organization: Duke University Zoology
Lines: 21
Summary: 

In article <1535@decwrl.UUCP> binder@dosadi.DEC writes:
>You can't read an Apple disk with any system whose controller was not 
>explicitly designed to read the Apple format.  That includes Apple, various 
>third parties, and one IBM plug-in that emulates the Apple... 

Something I've been wondering about for a while-- I've seen a number of
claims that one of the advantages of the odd disk controller scheme that
Apple uses is that since it is essentially controlled entirely by software,
it is more versatile than hardware controllers.  If that's really so, why
hasn't some clever hardware/software person figured out how to program
the *Apple* to read others' disk formats?  I've seen numbers of inquiries
about reading Apple disks on other machines, but none on reading/writing
other formats on Apples.  I realize that the 35 track disks that are Apple
standard might present a problem, but for simple information transfer,
who cares if 5 tracks are unusable?  (unless, of course, they happen to
be the directory tracks)  I for one would love to get a program that would
run on an Apple and read/write disks in whatever MFM 5.25" format
(perhaps Osborne SSSD, MSDOS 1.0, etc) was possible.

Ross Alford
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